


The Circle Loom

by ballantine



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2019-11-27 03:21:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18189125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: Time is a flat circle, and Rust Cohle traverses it like the ragged thread in a kid’s art project. Marty supposes that makes him the spokes.





	1. Two Boys

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[Translation]The Circle Loom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18325580) by [isaakfvkampfer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaakfvkampfer/pseuds/isaakfvkampfer)



> I read about half of The Time Traveler's Wife a decade ago; the term "chrono impairment" and the starting idea for this form of time travel comes from that. 
> 
> Please be aware that anything that shows up in the show is fair game here -- I haven't tagged for suicidal ideation or slurs, but they show up here and there.
> 
> Many, many thanks to [feoplepeel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/feoplepeel) for letting me talk at length about a crazy fic for a show she hasn't seen in five years, and for providing absolutely invaluable feedback and assistance when I struggled with certain parts.

The mind wants to ascribe meaning, has always been the problem; the more severe the suffering, the greater the temptation to read something into it. But any statistician will warn you off assuming significance in extremes.

So misery is happenstance. A byproduct of the conflict between human nature and consciousness. Rust could appreciate the potential for dark humor in this, being a freak of circumstance himself, one of those genetic cocktails that should have by all rights aborted itself from the womb but instead persevered to see the light of day.

Maybe if he'd been born into a devout family, he would have found refuge in delusions of god, but he was a by-blow raised in the indifferent Alaskan wilderness by a paranoid vet, and there never was any space in the cabin for delusions that didn't belong to his pop.

Access to routine, proper medical care might have given him a name for it earlier on – _chrono-impairment_ , he remembers reading as Claire's belly grew: rare, incurable, and fuck-you genetic – but it wouldn't have offered him any deeper answers.

The mind wants to ascribe meaning. It has taken a lifetime for him to accept, long past when he raised his hands and pledged understanding, that there is none to be found, not anywhere.

* * *

“So what'd you think – you, paired up with him.”

The phrasing suggested they already had the pleasure of meeting Rust.

He doesn't know why he says what he says next, the thing about not picking your parents or your partner; why he would make a connection between the two, one he'd never thought to make before. He's spent years trying to get his mind set into grooves like a good vinyl, but it still skips on him from time to time. Sometimes the skip breaks open a case. More often, he thinks it breaks his life.

“But he kind of did pick you, didn't he? First time he met you, he was, what,” and here the younger guy rifles through his notes, notes Marty can tell he don't actually need, “ten years old? Is that right?”

Ten, Jesus Christ. Marty is a long way from ten. Ten years isn't an _age_ , it's the length of time since his divorce, it's the postbellum of his partnership with Rust.

Marty clears his throat. “Look, I don't know how Rust tells it, but I'm a linear kind of guy. His end of things tends to give me a headache real quick. This'll be easier if you let me tell it like I want to tell it – unless you're reconsidering.”

He smiles at them, knowing he must look every inch the good ole boy they expect to see. And, yeah, maybe he leans into it a little – spreads his hands expansively over the table like a man settling in to tell tales at the country club.

“Dora Lange, kids in the woods. That's what y'all want to hear about, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Gilbough smiles politely back at him. Bullshit rejected. “But – talk about Cohle.”

Like he's spent his life talking about anything else. Still, ten years. He's out of practice. And not too thrilled to have it all come rushing back, to be fucking honest.

He feels the corners of his mouth turn sour, and he flicks a look between the two detectives again. Maybe they think he was the dumb one. Marty used to tell a joke around the station back in the day: there were two types of people in the bullpen. There was the type who thought Marty was the better detective, and there was Rust.

“He was ten,” Papania says again, and Marty wishes he'd quit with that. “He appeared in the middle of campus at UL Lafayette?”

Yeah, sure, he remembers Rust showing up at USL – who wouldn't remember a little kid dropping out of nowhere on the quad, especially a kid dressed like he spent too much time reading those My Side of the Mountain books. But that wasn't the first time Marty met him.

“It wasn't?” says Papania.

“No,” he says shortly. “First time I met him, I was fifteen. My mother'd just died – look, to be honest with you, for a long time, I associated the presence of Rust Cohle with some bad shit.”

He watches Papania make a note, brow set like he can already tell this is gonna get confusing. Try living it, he thinks.

“At first I thought he was some kind of, I don't know – a figment of my imagination. Grief stuff.”

His father hadn't cried at the funeral. He stood stiffly beside Marty and gripped his shoulder tight enough to bruise. Marty doesn't know if he'd been ashamed of his son's open tears or trying to get closer to them, like a hand pressed up against the glass.

Gilbough is frowning between his notes and Marty. “And you didn't tell your father about these encounters? Or another adult?”

Marty snorts. “Did I tell my grieving father some junkie talked to me? No. Of course not.” He ignores Papania's speaking look and addresses Gilbough directly, figuring he might have a chance at understanding. “C'mon. Lafayette in 1975? I was risking military school if I said I'd even _seen_ a leather jacket.”

Both detectives look back at him, not understanding. Marty bites at the inside of his mouth to suppress a grin, because with the distance of all these years, no longer being that kid banging around by himself in a house suddenly devoid of light and warmth, he can finally find it a little funny.

“When I met him, he wasn't strictly Rust. He was Crash, his narco cover.”

 

** Part I **

 

1975 (1979)

The first time it happens, he's tracking an elk through the woods. One moment he's controlling his breathing and stepping with light feet over a knotted tree root glittering with frost, and then he's turned sideways and standing in an oven.

In the first watercolor moment before it all coalesces, all he can think is how mad Pop's gonna be he let the elk slip away.

He almost shuts his eyes, because wherever he is, it's _bright_. The sun is heavy overhead like it's summer, not November, and green all around to match.

He puts a hand up to his forehead and squints around. The other grips his bow nervously. This is what will linger in his memory later: he wasn't afraid, he was on edge. This precipice feeling is one he will become very familiar with, one he'll grow to hate – do anything, _take_ anything, to avoid.

He's standing on a massive manicured lawn. In the distance are neatly ordered red brick buildings and people walking along sidewalks. Somewhere nearby, there's music.

Rust's pulse responds to this sensory overflow by speeding up. The glare of the sun makes his eyes burn and water, helplessly wide as they are. The lawn tilts beneath him, and he stumbles a little to keep his footing.

“Hey, kid,” someone says and then, spookily: “Rust. You okay?”

He whirls around, bringing his bow up automatically in defense, and the guy jumps back. “Whoa, watch it with that thing!”

He gets an impression of wide, sloped shoulders and a wave of hair, pale as unthreshed oat. _He said my name?_

His lungs are bursting – he's been holding his breath. He lets it out and blinks, and the tail end of the exhalation contracts and twists, visible in the newly cold air.

He's home again.

 

1975 (2012)

It happens again only a few weeks later.

The air is too warm in his lungs and a peculiar taste of aluminum and ash clings to his tongue. The vegetation is crawling up and over everything, choking the sky out with green he never knew could be so thick, or so menacing.

He doesn't move at first, hoping he's going to snap back like he did last time. But minutes pass and nothing happens, so he starts creeping forward – carefully, because his pops taught him about things that live in the jungle.

He advances by inches. Through the leaves he gets occasional glimpses of worn brick, older than any building he's ever seen back home. This place feels ancient but somehow alive. He ducks under a dark, leafy archway and comes face to face with a half-rotted human skeleton propped up on a nest of branches. It has antlers growing from its skull. His surroundings rearrange themselves before his eyes.

This isn't a jungle – it's a catacombs.

“Come on inside, little priest,” a dark, rich voice says. The speaker sounds multitudinous, like he exists all around him, but Rust sees no one, only the corpse.

His breathing is harsh and loud, echoing off the brickwork of the narrow archway. He backs up a step, two steps.

A twig snaps to his right and he spins around and stares into the slightly lowered barrel of a large handgun. The balding man attached to it stares back at him with wide, horrified eyes.

“Oh Jesus,” the man says. “Oh fuck, you never said.”

“What is this place?” Rust asks him in a high whisper; it doesn't feel like shouting will do him any good.

“Rust, you shouldn't be here,” the man says and Rust wants to scream back at him because yeah, no shit. “You need to hide, right now. Duck down and stay there until you go back.”

“Back?” He doesn't even question how the man knows him. In that moment, it feels like the least strange thing.

“I said, get down _._ ”

The man is terrified, Rust realizes; the whites of his eyes are visible, like a cornered animal. He's never seen an adult look so scared. So he obeys. He backs out of the archway and climbs shakily over a crumbled pile of rocks. He stares down at the wicked twisting vines covering the ground and glances back at the man for confirmation.

“Close your eyes,” the man says. “Whatever you hear, I need you to stay put. Do you understand?”

He has barely nodded before the man is raising his gun. He turns decisively into the archway and disappears out of sight. Rust immediately feels worse without him there as a distraction.

“Little priest,” that terrible voice says again, echoing out through the twisting dark interior of the catacombs.

Rust makes himself as small as he can, hugging his knees to his chest and burying his face into the space he's made.

“Come die with me, little priest.”

A few minutes later, gunshots rent the air, unmistakable and in rapid succession.

Rust thinks _I don't want to die_. He thinks it hard and desperate, over and over, the closest he's ever come to prayer. He thinks it until his father comes back to the cabin that evening and stands over him, scratching his beard and asking what the hell is wrong with him now. He hadn't even realized he'd gone back, he was so cold with dread.

It takes a long time for the shaking to stop, for the taste of that place to leave his mouth. He keeps wondering if the man with the gun is okay – he can't make himself believe he is.

 

1975 (2009)

The third time it happens, he doesn't seem to go so far. He is pretty sure he's still in Alaska; the damp chill is a tip-off, and the way the slate sky overhead tastes of salt and the first reappearance of wilted leaves after a melt.

There's a trailer: a little broken down, siding peeling back like birch bark. Beside the door is a folding chair, and in the folding chair is an old man. He looks maybe a bit like Pops, the way every man with sad eyes and long hair does.

“Shit, that today?” he drawls when he sees Rust, like his sudden appearance on the doorstep is as commonplace and tiresome as a Jehovah's Witness canvass. Whoever he is, he’s not from around here, not with that accent.

The man looks away and lights his cigarette, takes a long drag from it, long like the breath Rust always tries to store before diving underwater, like it's something he can put away deep inside to use later.

“Who're you?” asks Rust, thinking this might be like one of his books and he needs to collect clues.

The old man spins him a tale about himself. He tells him he is _spacetime's bitch_. He tells him he will never have any control over it, but it will never put him in direct danger (that won't be what puts him in direct danger, is the unspoken aside; the man talks around issues like Pops too).

He tells him it doesn't have any meaning, so don't bother looking for one.

“Who are you?” he asks again, insistent.

Another drag, a shuttered gaze. “You know who I am, kiddo.”

He's the worst thing Rust's ever seen: all dead eyes and sagging, unhealthy skin, tobacco-stained fingers. And he is an impossibility, because Rust is going to move to a city, somewhere far away from here. He's going to move to a city and meet people and maybe even make friends –

“No. No, I get out of here, I _know_ I do. I've been – ”

“Saving up pocket change. Yeah, I remember.” He raises his beer and toasts him. “You should start trapping. Bill Burns down the road will pay you under the table for marten and fox. You can do a better job with the pelt than he can.” He shrugs. “Arthritis.”

Rust looks blindly around at the trailer and the ugly scrub-grass lot. “I ain't gonna end up like this.”

The man wears an imposter’s smile. “Go ahead. Tell your future self all about how you're not going to become him. That sounds like a strategy with legs.”

Rust's eyes burn.

He continues on, unstoppable, “I'd tell you to read up on causality and time paradoxes, but I know you're already making a little mental list of things to look up at the library.”

The panic is choking him, his breath coming in short, painful bursts. The man seems to recognize this, but he looks upon it with no sympathy.

“Fuck you,” he manages at last, glaring at him with narrow wet eyes. “ _Fuck_ you. I hate you.”

“Yeah.” Rust Cohle blows out a long stream of smoke. “Yeah, I've heard that one before.”

 

1975

The first time Marty gets drunk, he's fifteen and it's not as good as his dad's friends always made it seem.

He's hiding from the wake in the upstairs bathroom. He's got the door closed and is trying to choke down the whiskey he found in his dad's workbench in the garage.

The whiskey tastes godfuckingawful and it's making him sweat in his itchy suit jacket. When he raises his head enough to see his reflection in the bathroom mirror, his face is a violent splotchy red, like he's been crying. Even his ears are inflamed. He breathes in and out roughly a few times, psyching himself up, and gamely gives it another go – he takes a hard swig from the bottle and ends up spluttering over the sink for the next minute. After, he splashes water on his face, rinses his mouth and spits.

When he looks into the mirror again, none of this seems to have helped; in fact, the force of the coughing has brought tears to his eyes, completing the pathetic picture of a weepy little kid.

Marty kind of wants to throw the bottle against the tiled wall of the shower; he wants to punch the mirror or launch himself out the second story window.

Instead, he dries his hands on a towel and opens the door to step back out into the hallway that runs between his parents' bedroom and his own. He stops short as he notices the man standing a few feet away. He is loitering like he came to use the bathroom and got stuck studying the family photos on the wall.

Marty says, “You're not supposed to be up here.”

The man has his hands folded behind his back. It's a weird stance. It might look military if he wasn't wearing torn jeans and a biker jacket, but he is, so instead it looks like he's used to being thrown against the side of a cop cruiser. The jacket is intense. Marty's never really seen one up close before. It's kind of like stumbling upon an Uzi lying on the floor.

The man looks over at him. His eyes are red-rimmed, more so even than Marty's. Marty can't tell if he's on something or been crying. He has bad skin and a wild dog wariness about him – he looks torn up in just about every way a person can be.

The man's voice unspools unsteadily from due west. A Texan. “Hey there, Marty. Was wondering where you'd got to.” He takes him in with a vague frown. “Fuck. You're just a child.”

_And what about the poor boy, losing his mother when he's just a child...._

“I'm not a child,” Marty says. He can still taste the whiskey lingering on his tongue and feel the violence stored in his limbs and knows he speaks the truth. He has the insane feeling if one more person calls him a child, he's either going to throw a punch or start crying again.

“That's what children always say.” The man gestures at the wall. “I guess the photos should have been a tip-off, huh. Never seen you this young before.”

The man is definitely on something. It should make Marty nervous, but it doesn't. Things have been like this for the past couple weeks: weird, like certain emotions are just out of reach now his mom isn't around to fetch them down for him.

“Who are you?” _How'd you know her?_

The man seems to find this question kind of funny, because his mouth hook up into an unhinged grin and he lets out this small, choking laugh, sounds like an engine struggling to start. _Eh-heh-heh_. It's pretty awful.

“I suppose there had to be a first time for you at some point. You won't see the humor in it being now, but trust me, given the last time I saw you – this is pretty funny.”

“There's nothing funny about any of this,” Marty says.

“Agree to disagree.” The man seems fixated on the photo at the end of the line and barely hears him.

The photo was a professional job from when Marty was maybe-eight. His parents are standing behind him with a hand on each of his shoulders. He and his dad are in matching navy suits, his mom is in a light green dress with ruffles around her calves. Marty doesn't remember the day, but she must've – she must've had a whole life of days he wouldn't remember and now will never know about. He's walked past the picture for years and barely even sees it anymore. He wants to snatch it off the wall and hide it away from this stranger's starving gaze.

“You shouldn't be here,” he says again, rediscovering his temper from earlier. “I could throw you out.”

He immediately hates how the words sound; instead of strong and threatening, they are just weak. He doesn't even know why he's bothering talking to the guy; his dad always said people who take drugs can't be reasoned with and shouldn't be talked to like humans, much less rational adults.

The man tears his eyes away from the photo and looks at him again. He says, very slowly, “You're allowed, man. If that's really what you wanna do.” He sucks in a sharp breath and leans away from Marty. The lean becomes a stumble. He catches himself roughly on the banister at the top of the stairs and curls over it like he's going to be sick. “I shouldn't be here right now. 'M kinda fucked up.”

“Yeah, no _shit_ ,” Marty says loudly. The liquor's settled in his stomach a little and he's feeling hotter than ever. He takes a step forward.

This freak probably didn't even know her.

He would've done something then – thrown a punch, or shoved him or _something_ – but the guy disappears. Vanishes, a blink and he's gone. Marty is left shaken and alone in the hallway with his father calling his name from the bottom of the stairs, asking him why he's shouting when they've got people over.

After, Marty kind of wishes the man hadn't gone. He'd been the only person in the house who didn't coo or talk over him.

That's the first time.

* * *

Second time the man visits, it takes Marty a moment to recognize him because he's cleaned up some. He's lost the jacket in favor of a sleeveless undershirt that shows off a large tattoo of a bird on his right forearm. It manages to feel more dangerous than the jacket.

He sits on Marty's back deck in the afternoon sun, legs dangling over the side and slowly-bronzing arms resting on the middle board in the railing. He has a bruise the shape of a hand around the back of his neck, gone ugly green and yellow from age. Marty can't stop glancing at it.

“Don't think you've ever been this young before,” he comments when he looks around and sees Marty. So he was _definitely_ on drugs last time.

Marty stands a few feet away near the door to the house, not wanting to get too close or let his guard down, in case he proves to be really unstable. But the man doesn't do anything but sit there and smoke and watch the backyard. He doesn't seem particularly interested in Marty's presence, for that matter.

“You disappeared last time,” Marty says. “Into thin air.”

One shoulder lifts and falls. “I do that.”

“You some kind of ghost or angel or something?”

The man casts him a skeptical look; he has the most potent _are you kidding me_ expression he's ever seen, like Marty is the weird one here.

Marty shifts on his feet. He rubs his forehead under the flopping fringe of his hair. He says finally, “Okay, well. You gonna explain yourself or what?”

The man sighs and drops ash over the side of the deck. It's probably getting all over his mom's Chrysanthemums – should he be bothered by that? Is this one of those things that matters to him, or something people would say should matter? Silence is his only answer. The same strange disconnect he's felt for weeks.

“I'm not anything you need to worry about, kid,” the man says. He gestures vaguely with his cigarette. “I got a condition, I come and go. We know each other in the future, so sometimes I travel near you. Nothing more to it than that.”

“Uh huh,” Marty says, disbelieving. “If we know each other in the future, then what's my favorite color?”

That narrow, fine-boned face twists; he is baffled and annoyed at being baffled. “Why the fuck would I know your favorite color?”

Marty goes back inside the house and locks the door behind him.

* * *

He gets a string of visits through '75 and '76, and somewhere in there he grows accustomed to it. Years later people will ask him in tones ranging from astonished to suspicious, _how do you put up with him?_ And Marty will shrug and laugh and say, quite truthfully: _exposure therapy_.

It's confusing at first, because the age of his visitor doesn't seem to stay the same.

One day Crash is there, strung tight on uppers and methodically opening every cupboard in the kitchen. Says he's looking for straws and won't accept Marty's answer that they don't have any in the house. He's wearing a stained T-shirt and torn jeans that are a little too long and a little too loose.

Marty, sitting on one of the kitchen stools at the counter and half-heartedly trying to focus on his geometry homework, sneaks looks whenever his back is turned. He feels a queasy little thrill whenever he sees a flash of hipbone.

Crash is talking in a slow, meandering fashion, “Don't know what the hang-up is on this year. Why I'm always coming back to it. It's like, I keep getting older but you stay the same age.”

“Am I supposed to apologize or something?” says Marty.

By now Crash knows Marty's dad is always working and he's alone most of the time, but Marty thought they kind of have an unspoken agreement not to talk about it: the empty rooms and dead air. Which is why he feels a little betrayed when Crash leans his elbows on the counter, lights a cigarette, and asks him if he needs adult supervision, like _he_ 's the one requiring Crash to hang around.

“Maybe you're the one who needs supervising, Crash,” Marty says, and feels a little victorious when the man sucks on his cigarette and raises his eyebrows, like _shit, maybe._

Or it's five months later and Crash is snapping, “don't fucking call me that.”

He looks sober and just generally better, somehow, and Marty is weirdly glad but also finding it hard to look at him too long. Because he is kind of, well, _pretty_ when he's actually washing his face and hair on the regular and not taking loads of drugs all the time.

“What the hell am I supposed to call you, then?”

And that's the first time Rust lets slip they're going to work together. He won't tell Marty any more than that, and he angles his weird sketchbook away whenever he suspects Marty's trying to sneak a look.

“Is it some kind of _diary_?” Marty asks. He's still testing the waters with Rust, seeing if he's allowed to tease him or not.

Rust is immune to teasing, however. “They're notes. Help me keep things straight.”

The first time Rust actually says the word _partner_ , Marty gets this nervous flush of heat all through his body. He tries not to react much at all to compensate for it, but he's a rotten liar and the effort expended to appear casual only serves to make Rust look at him more intently. Marty's face feels feverish for what feels like two solid months.

One time Marty asks, “What kind of man am I? In the future, I mean.” He's been grounded for fighting in school. His dad is going to call at the top of every hour to make sure he hasn't left the house, but there's not much he can do about Rust, who he still doesn't know about.

“The kind of man who cares what people think,” replies Rust, but he says it like it's a bad thing.

And it's one thing to know your freakish time-traveling partner isn't visiting you in a straightforward order, but it's another to see a child appear on your campus, wearing layers of patched flannel and torn woolen trousers and holding a goddamn bow like the saddest little frontier boy in history. Marty's half-surprised he's not wearing a Davy Crockett cap, until he remembers the kid hasn't grown up to be a Texan quite yet.

He tries to help him and nearly gets hammered in the face with the bow.

“Whoa, watch it with that thing!” And he's staring, because – well, because it's _Rust_ but he's a _kid_ , just a little kid, and he's –

Gone again.

“Marty?” says Mags, finally catching up. She reaches out to take his hand, and he laces their fingers together automatically, immediately feels the better for it. “You took off running. I don't get it, what happened?”

“I – Rust,” he says. “Rust was here.”

She looks around like maybe Rust is an imaginary friend and he needs to be humored. “That friend you told me about?”

“He was just a little kid,” he says, mostly to himself.

She lets go of his hand to place her own on her hip and gives him a tilted look like maybe he's making fun of her. “I thought he was older than you.”

That's the day he starts to realize how far the whole thing must go. It takes seeing Rust like that – scared and helpless – to finally understand the man really isn't some half-assed guardian angel sent by a maybe-stoned but essentially well-intentioned God. He's just a man (a _kid_ ) and he doesn't have any more control over what is going to happen than does Marty.

Marty gets real drunk that night.

 

1980

In time, Rust cultivates coping mechanisms for all of it; steals and smokes full-strength cigarettes to tamp down on the distracting tangle of tastes his sight gives him. Tracks his pulse and starts running cross country, trying to stay baseline. But nothing under the sun gives as good as drinking.

The first time he gets drunk, he's fifteen and it's a revelation.

He's sitting in the back of a junker minivan with the doors slid out and there is a girl with him. Nicole Strauss. Her dad owns the yard the junker's parked in, and the bottle of vodka too.

Warmth seeps into his world; his knees are the first to feel it. He pictures his molecules vibrating faster and faster, too fast to be caught up in the slipstream of time. The unexpected warmth reminds him of a green lawn and tallow hair, and he holds close the thought that such things are maybe out there waiting for him.

Rust drinks and he starts talking without even realizing it's happening. He's so unused to verbalizing his thoughts aloud. Nicole Strauss calls him weird but seems content enough to continue sharing the bottle, which is all that really matters. She kisses him and that's warm too.

Drinking will eventually become a more withholding lover, but in those early days it is euphoric. After a few years the joy will drain away and alcohol will only make him feel less, make _him_ less. But by then, that will feel like a kind of success.

 

1982

Marty adapts. He's a steady guy, it's what he does; when the steer bucks, you adjust your grip, lean back, and hold on.

He thinks he must even pick up a little of Rust's crossed synapses mumbo jumbo, because he starts pairing things that have no reasonable business being paired. He associates ages with emotions, the length of Rust's hair with length of the stick up his ass. That kinda thing.

One night late in his last semester at USL, he's in his apartment and a little drunk, flipping listlessly through a vocational guidebook. He's pretty sure he becomes a cop, but Rust won't say either way. Like it's better for Marty to think his future work partner was at one point a gunslinging piece of shit junkie for real and not just undercover.

(Rust would say there's no half-truths in life, only different perspectives. Rust says shit like that all the time. On good days he seems to find Marty's continued imperviousness to his way of thinking almost a comfort; on bad days he looks at Marty like he's some stones he put in his pocket, and he's about to take a walk in the river.)

Marty gets up to grab a fifth Dixie and when he gets back to the couch, Rust is standing over the coffee table.

Marty looks at him and bursts out laughing. “I fuckin' knew it!”

This Rust is young – has to be his age, maybe a year or two older at most. He's skinnier than ever and wearing a neatly pressed short-sleeved police uniform. Marty is so used to seeing Rust older and more worn, he can’t help but find this one just a little fucking adorable.

“You again,” Rust says, not moving. His eyes scope the apartment out like it's a potential crime scene.

“Me again.” Marty spreads his arms and grins at him. “And again, and again, and – hey, you don't have your tattoo yet.” He stares for a little too long at the bare arm, but seriously – it's weird. Naked.

Rust narrows his eyes at him, like he isn't sure whether he's being mocked or not. “No, I don't have a tattoo.”

“And your accent's different. Not so thick. Guess you haven't been down in Texas too long, huh.”

The crest on his sleeve reads City of Houston, and Marty has a moment of crazed exhilaration where he realizes he could drive over and _look_ for him, find him for real. It’d be like a reverse magic trick, the amazing un-disappearing Rust.

Rust shifts his stance, his arms going behind his back. Marty has seen the move a couple dozen times, but this is the first it's ever looked like the product of awkwardness. He shakes his head, fascinated.

“So you know me. More than a little,” Rust says, tone questioning. He doesn't look displeased at the idea, exactly, but definitely hesitant.

“Sure I know you, Rust.” He nods at the couch. “Here, sit down and take a load off. I'll get you a beer, you want a beer?” He's already turning back to the kitchen.

He returns with a second Dixie and is silently victorious to see the other guy perched on the end of the couch. He's reading the back cover of the vocational guidebook, finger tucked inside so as to not lose Marty's place in the chapter on journalists. Skepticism writ large across his face.

“What, like you came fully formed into life knowing you'd be a cop?” Marty hands him the beer and flops down beside him on the couch, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. He pauses and looks over. “Wait. Did you?”

Rust cracks open the can, and Marty is relieved the whole Spock act doesn't extend to drinking. He doesn't think he could take the strangeness of that just now, not on top of Rust sitting in his apartment dressed like a bachelorette party stripper.

“My future selves have always been pretty reticent on the topic,” Rust admits, and commits to a long drink from the can.

“Visiting yourself,” reflects Marty. “That's gotta be weird.”

Rust inclines his head. “Not as weird as this, to be honest.” He takes another contemplative drink and pins him with a penetrating stare.

Marty stares back, off guard and a little wide-eyed. He maybe sat down closer to Rust than necessary, but that was just habit – years of curiosity and a passive offering he's never, not once, been taken up on. But right now there are fewer barriers than usual between them, like Rust being decades older or younger, or high. Marty wets his bottom lip and mentally edges up to the cliffside.

Rust asks, “What's your name?”

Marty can only throw his head back and laugh. He sounds a little unhinged. After a second, Rust seems to get it’s not at his expense, and his mouth curls in a quiet smile, acknowledging the ridiculousness of the situation.

He waits for Marty to settle and they drink some more. Eventually he shifts restlessly on the couch. That Rust, Marty thinks with boozy fondness: never still a moment in his life.

“But seriously. Your name?”

He is less patient when this sets Marty off again.

 

1983

Marty is home with the flu, which is terrible because unlike when he was a kid, he always ends up wallowing in lonely self-pity on top of the sickness. His place is a disaster of dirty laundry, dirty dishes – it's all just _dirty_ , and he's dirty too, because he's felt too crummy to even crawl into the shower.

So of course this is the perfect time for Rust to show up, dressed in a smooth blue shirt that stretches across his chest and shoulders like it was designed with him in mind, with his neat short hair, and generally looking about a hundred times better than Marty feels.

Marty raises his hand in weary welcome from the couch, which he hasn't left in about ten hours except to piss.

Rust approaches slowly, putting his analytic eye to good use and finally pronouncing:

“Sick?”

Marty taps the side of his nose. “Shoulda spotted you for a detective first time I saw you.”

That doesn't get so much as a flicker of a smile from Rust. Marty watches him a moment, looking past the slick appearance and noticing the shadows under his eyes, the pinch of his mouth. He's middle-aged, but that's not all that's wrong with him.

“Hey, what's with you?”

“Nothin',” he says shortly. He picks up a sweater Marty threw on the end of the sofa when he was running a fever earlier and gives it this look like it's a dead rat. He tosses it aside and sits in its place.

Marty take the new proximity as an opportunity and kicks his thigh until Rust looks over. Once he's looking, Marty stares at him meaningfully.

Rust says, “You give me the same look across the desk in the station sometimes. Seven years and I still don't know what the fuck you mean by it.”

Seven years. Marty files that away in the mental drawer where he keeps all information Rust drops. If it was a physical drawer, it'd have a label that read something like: Withholding Asshole.

“Well I don't know about all those times, but right now I want you to get me some 7 Up. I'm sick,” Marty reminds him, because Rust might've literally been raised by wolves up in Alaska. “I shouldn't get up.”

He is treated to an almighty eye roll but Rust goes and gets him a glass of 7 Up and resumes his seat. He even absently pulls Marty's feet into his lap, to Marty's silent, strangled delight.

Rust looks at the TV a little blankly, like he's never seen one before, but immediately puts that thought to bed by announcing, “I am fucking sick of television.”

“Oh,” says Marty, casting him an unimpressed look. “Of course. You're one of those types, thinks he's too good for TV.”

Rust ignores him. He nods at the screen. “What is this?”

“Old movie on Channel 16. _The Defiant Ones_. Seen it?” And when Rust shakes his head, he says, “Sit back, man. It's only like twenty minutes in. Fox plays a commercial every five minutes or so, but it's all good.”

He zones out for a while, only half paying attention, but really soaking up the comfort of having another body in the room, even if that body belongs to a prickly son of a bitch like Rust (all right, all right: especially because the body belongs to Rust).

Tony Curtis says, “Everybody winds up alone, not just you – everybody. That's the way it is.”

“Oh my god,” Marty says, the words coming out in an over-eager wheeze. He kicks his feet. “Rust, did you hear that? It's you. It's us.”

Rust clearly hasn't been paying very close attention to the movie; he blinks and rouses, looks around at Marty and drawls, “What're you talking about?”

“These guys, they're _us_.” Marty gestures to the TV, but it's gone to commercial break and trying to sell him on batteries. “Haven't you been watching? They're shackled together and on the run. Tony Curtis, he's basically you. He's kind of a dick,” he explains, mostly to see if he can get Rust to smile. He is rewarded with a twitch of the lips. A one-pointer.

“That make you Sidney Poitier?” Rust says, skeptical. He starts digging in his pocket, hand dodging the next kick Marty sends his way.

“He's tough, ain't he?”

“He smokes,” Rust says around his cigarette, rather pointedly. “He's always smoking.”

“They both smoke. And he's the one with a family. You said I got a family, remember?” It's something he let slip once, back when Marty was seventeen. He doesn't know how old Rust was when he made the remark. He thinks probably he was older than this one.

Definitely older than this one, because now Rust is frowning. He rubs the heel of his hand on his kneecap, restless. “Shouldn't be telling you shit about your life.” He stares into some middle distance past the television screen. “Bad enough you're shackled to me.”

Marty's grin fades a little. He hadn't meant it like that. He tries sitting up against the couch armrest so he can get a better look at him, and the movement happens to pull his feet off his lap. “Hell, Rust. Not like it was bad news.”

It had been a nice thing to hear when he was seventeen. It was before he left for college, when his dad was working all the time. Empty rooms, dead air.

“Yeah,” Rust says, real quiet like he's not really listening. “Yeah, Marty.”

Marty falls asleep about an hour later and when he wakes up again, the movie is over and Rust is long gone. He doesn't know if he got to see the end of the movie; he hopes so. He hopes the two guys made the train.

* * *

Marty is studying for the police certification exam when Crash stumbles hard against his closet, holding a hand to his left side. The leather of his jacket is shinier than usual, and when he tips forward, Marty sees the blood.

Rust told him he should look into first responder training, but son of a bitch had sounded so casual when he said it, like he didn't know this is what it was for – his younger self seizing and choking on gasps, twisting in a half-circle and leaving streaks of shockingly bright gore on the floor of Marty's room.

He throws himself down beside him, skidding a little in the blood and probably bruising the fuck out of his knees. He reaches over and yanks open the bottom desk drawer with enough force to take it off the slides, and fishes out the kit he has waiting inside (identical kits are also in his car, his gym bag, and the bottom of his backpack and have been for two months).

“Easy, easy,” he says to Crash, who is shaking and looking at him with a chilling lack of recognition. Marty works quickly, ripping open the non-adhesive gauze and packing it in the – Jesus, fuck – _three_ gunshot wounds in his side. “You're gonna be all right, man. Rust? You hear me?”

He packs the wounds and leans forward to apply pressure as best he can. He listens helplessly to Crash's sucking, labored breaths, and realizes how much he doesn't want Rust to be hurt. It feels personal, this pain.

It shouldn't be such a shocking revelation, but it is. Marty keeps the pressure on and blinks through wide, wet eyes at his patient, who is trying to say something.

Marty laughs, a little raggedly, and leans forward so his forehead is resting against Rust's. “Man, ain't you lucky I been fucking a nurse.”

He disappears less than a minute later, leaving Marty covered in tacky blood that's already cooling.

The next time he sees him, it's five weeks later and Marty's moving into his new place. Boxes are piled around like navigational cairns, sorted by room but only half unpacked. Marty's digging through one in the kitchen, looking for his coffee filters, when Rust appears next to the fridge.

He looks around with slow surprise, which turns to sharp-eyed alarm as Marty flings himself across the linoleum and hauls him in close. It's half-hug, half-grapple; Rust pushes back, probably instinctive, but Marty holds on just as tight. They careen sideways into the counter, elbows clattering against a spray of unsorted flatware, their hips knocking together.

“Stop resisting, you asshole,” Marty snarls, spitting through a mouthful of hair that hasn't been washed in god-knows-how-long. “I thought you was gonna die.”

It's not logical – he's seen and talked to older Rusts – but trying to clean up blood armed only with paper towels and vinegar has a way of killing the logic centers of the brain. Marty's learned two things: blood is even thicker than it looks and generic paper towel ain't worth the savings.

“Marty?” Rust says after a moment, like he isn't sure.

Marty draws back, letting a few inches between them. Ignoring the hard, searching look he's given, he drags Rust's shirt up and stares at the unblemished stretch above his waist. He flattens his hand against it, like the skin needs to be tested to see if it'll hold. Rust shivers a little, but Marty can't tell if it's from his touch or whatever he's on. Because he's on _something_ , of course he is.

Marty calms a little. He knows it's stupid, he knows there's still a Rust out there who is bleeding, same as there's one who is healing. But he only ever has one in front of him at a time, and this one is whole.

Marty looks into his eyes; well, mostly whole.

“Why is it always you?” Rust asks, sounding a little lost. He is indifferent to the way he's being manhandled, now he knows who's doing it. Rust letting him get so close does something funny to Marty's head.

He's always letting Marty get in close.

“What – you don't know?” Marty is not used to being the well-informed one. He looks Rust over closely. Drugs are crazy-making but more than that, they fuck with people's skin so much it can be impossible to judge age. But he thinks this Rust might be around his age for once.

“Crash,” he says, testing. Rust blinks at him, not hesitating at the name but maybe a little surprised Marty knows it. “Man, when are you from?”

Rust's gaze goes faraway. “It's been a couple years.”

“Since you saw me?”

“Since I traveled.”

There's obviously something going on about _that_ , but looking at his expression, Marty doesn't think it's worth getting into at the moment. He shifts against him, not letting go but reaching out with his other hand to tug lightly on the edge of his jacket. It feels slightly stiffer than usual. Like the leather's not been broken in quite yet. “And how long you been doing this?”

“I think part of me has always been doing it.”

Not helpful. But then, Rust rarely is. “Well, it's not forever, so don't go thinking like that. You still gotta come to Louisiana and be my partner.”

The word seems to reach Rust where nothing else has. Marty can feel him tense slightly, and he lets up a little with his grip to compensate.

“We're partners?” Rust says.

Marty's mouth is dry. He tries clearing his throat. “Count on it.”

Rust's gaze slowly pinballs between his eyes and his mouth, and finally Marty can't see a reason not to – surely Rust from the future would stop him if there was one? – so he leans in and kisses him.

Rust's lips part, but he doesn't kiss back. Marty makes a small noise, frustration and yearning trying to go undercover as soothing. He lets go of the jacket in favor of cupping his jaw, like maybe if he just gets the angle right, this will go his way.

He doesn't think he's been reading them wrong all these years. He can't have.

A light touch on his wrist; a calloused thumb curling around to rest against his pulse. Rust refuses to turn away from him, but he also won't kiss back. Finally, Marty does it for him: turns and ducks his head in one swift, rough move.

His face is burning bright with something like shame. He clears his throat again, compulsive. He can feel Rust looking at him and blindly reaches for the first thing he can think of – the box he'd been digging through earlier. What had he been looking for? Coffee filters.

Rust almost sounds like he's been shot. Again. “Marty, man, I'm sorry. I'm not – ”

“A fag?” Marty interrupts, too-casual. “Neither am I. I was just – I just thought – ”

“You're expecting me to be a person,” says Rust, empty-eyed. “I can't do that.”

Marty gets the box of filters in hand and stares down at them. Why the fuck was he looking for filters? It's six in the evening. He says, “I don't really know what the hell that means. But seriously, Rust – don't worry about it.”

He risks a glance over at the other man. Rust stares back, arms down at his sides like a cut marionette. Marty tries to grin, and it feels like something packaged in plastic, the stiff lethal kind that require a blade for opening.

He learned about this at the academy, he thinks: the risk you run when you're too eager to reach a certain conclusion. He and Rust know each other in the future – that's a fact, stripped of any inference or inflection. Somewhere over the years he started attaching assumptions to it. Turned it into a grand narrative, some stupid queer love story.

“It's not a big deal. Let's – forget it happened. It shouldn't've, I was just,” and he stalls out for a moment, because even he can recognize there's a limit to denial. Finally he says, aiming for some kind of truth, “I was just happy you're okay.”

Rust blinks at him, like he's wondering why they hell Marty could ever think he's okay.

 

1985

He and Maggie get married at the city, each with their own private reasons for not wanting to make a big production with a church ceremony.

Maggie doesn't want to get married with her parents present but doesn't want the drama associated with not inviting them. Marty knows his side of the church is destined to be mostly empty, a father and a few friends from college and the academy. He doesn't like the idea of being so obvious, of broadcasting the narrowed state of his life to the world.

It's a mostly bureaucratic affair anyway, but he rents a nice suit and she wears her hair up tall and fancy. Their witnesses are a married couple she knows from nursing school.

As they wait, they sneak curious looks at the other couples in the room – the excited pair of whispering teenagers in the corner, the elderly couple who don't stop holding hands the whole time they're waiting. Eventually Maggie loses interest in the others and rests her head against his shoulder. He slips his hand into hers and dares to press a kiss against the complicated infrastructure of her hair. He can see her lips curve into a smile on the periphery of his vision.

He keeps glancing around like a best man might show up, right up until their names are called.

 

1985 (2012)

Three men drinking the day away in a country bar, and Rust makes four. But the only one that really matters is Marty. Marty, who is still miraculously around in Rust's future life. His grin is identical to the one he wears in college. So, too, are the red wings of drinker's flush spread across his face.

Rust doesn't like the way his older self looks at him: like he's a weak link, like he's going to spill state secrets.

“What are y'all talking about?” he asks.

Older Rust looks at him appraisingly and says, “Torture.”

Torture doesn't work, or so he's read. He tells them this, wondering if he learns something in the intervening years that contradicts all the books and manuals. Marty seems more amused than the surface contents of the exchange warrant, but maybe that's just his way.

The topic of torture will be revisited many times in his later years, and he'll realize that _doesn't work_ is not quite the same thing as _ineffective_.

 

1986

Maggie is sleeping the sleep of the heavily medicated on the fourth floor, and Baby Girl Hart is fussing a little in her bassinet in the newborn nursery. Marty stands at the viewing window and thinks about how he's worked on two relatively high-profile homicide cases since making detective, but he's never felt more nervous or out of his depth than this moment right here.

He feels more than sees when Rust appears at his side, and he is glad.

“Was hoping you'd show up,” he says, not taking his eyes off the tiny pink bundle in the fourth row. “Come meet my daughter, man.”

Rust doesn't respond, so he drags his gaze away and gets a good look at him.

He's wearing a red and white plaid shirt been scuffed and his hair is shorn short like it is sometimes when he's in his “slick prick – uppity” age. A massive purpling bruise decorates the upper left side of his face. He takes in his new surroundings with the attitude of one enduring some terrible last torture before he'll be allowed to rest.

And Marty doesn't even want to _know_ , not right now. It's hard to worry too much about the man; Rust is Rust and he's fine, or he will be fine. Eventually.

“Quite the shiner you got there. Did you even put ice on that?”

“It's fine,” Rust says. His voice is rough like he hasn't spoken in a while. He won't look at Marty but trains his gaze blindly at the wall.

He tries again. “Lemme guess – I should see the other guy?”

Rust closes his eyes.

 

1987-1991

Hypoxia.

Years later when environmental science is getting a little more coverage, Rust will read about the largest oceanic dead zone in the world that sits along the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, muffling the coast of Texas and Louisiana like a pillow over a sleeping face. The concept will feel familiar.

Her death consumes all the oxygen in his life. The dead zone expands out in every direction from the moment in the hospital when they turn off the droning heart monitor. Causality be fucked; he doesn't travel once during her entire life and more than a year after it's been swiftly ended.

In his dreams he travels to Sophia at eight, at thirteen. He sees her graduate high school, her black hair braided and pinned up like Claire's around her cap, her smile a little shy like his. Rust is so preoccupied imagining her future, he never wonders why he isn't seeing it. For the first time since he was ten years old, he lives solely in the present.

He was barely aware he wasn't traveling after she was born. Having a child is all about giving oneself over to a fool's hope. Rust was reckless with the joy of it and simply didn't care. He did not _care_. He knew he loved her, and surely that was the important part, surely that meant she was safe.

He was wrong. Time eats itself and he falls spiraling out of the present forever, gets stranded simultaneously in the past and future, where everything is raw and already spoken for.

 

1992 (1975)

Marty's face twists in anger and revulsion when he looks at him, which is only right; he is a child, and Crash is a monster. It is the nature of their respective roles.

The man who used to live inside Crash's skin looks at this boy who doesn't know them yet and wishes he could be saved, but it's too late. Time is an illusion; this child may appear asymptomatic, but Crash has already seeped through his lifetime, contaminating it. Marty Hart can't be saved.

“You shouldn't be here,” Marty tells him. From the mouths of babes.

Crash shouldn't be fucking anywhere.

 

1993 (2012)

One black night he is out behind the clubhouse smoking a cigarette when the light pollution on the horizon noticeably brightens. It glimmers and grows like an atomic detonation, beckoning him closer. His step forward takes him into a dark hospital room.

Marty sleeps.

He's only seen him this old a few times before. His hair is mostly gone, but he's still sturdy, or he would be if not for the bandages padding his chest under the hospital gown.

He looks like the kind of man who tucks his polos into his jeans and hosts poker night for the guys once a month. Positively brimming with backyard barbecue vibes. He's not without his flaws and eccentricities, but he is essentially regular in most of the ways that matter to society.

So why is he alone in this hospital room?

The hallway outside is quiet. No ring adorns his hand. A couple balloons and cards litter one corner of the room, but they contain no message more personal than _get well soon_ and a collection of signed names that could have easily been made up by pitying nurses. The chair beside the bed is pushed back, tucked against the wall, and there is no hint of a spouse just stepped away – no partner either, but that relationship category's elasticity is undetermined; Rust remains unconvinced he won't stretch it to snapping.

He is passing through the shaky second stage of a comedown. It's a walking coma, an anhedonic funk. And he doesn't like hospitals. He could walk out into the quiet night, keep walking under the stars until his steps strike back down on Houston cement. He's no good to Marty like this.

He quietly drags the chair closer to the hospital bed and sits down. He tells himself he'll probably disappear before Marty wakes up.

Naturally the man jerks awake with a sharp hiss of pain less than a hour later.

Crash makes no move to touch him as he blinks groggily up at the ceiling. Marty's hand hovers over his sternum but never quite lands, like its uncertain of its welcome.

Marty performs a quickly aborted double-take when he sees him sitting beside the bed. His eyes rove over him like he's something fascinating, but it's a different flavor of fascination than the one wielded by the teenage Marty he has become accustomed to, whose initial wariness gave way quickly to the lure of novelty and company. This attention approaches from a different direction entirely; this Marty knows him.

He folds his shaking hands between his knees and stares openly back.

“Do you want to live?” Marty asks. “Have you ever wanted to live?”

He thinks about this. He doesn't want to lie – he lies to everyone these days, but Marty is so divorced from his linear existence, he feels like a safe receptacle for unvarnished truths. “Never saw much point in framing the situation in terms of desire,” he offers.

“Christ.” Marty tips his head back against his pillow and shuts his eyes.

Something within him violently hates the closed eyes, this face in repose. It puts him on edge. He says, “I don't think suicide's in my nature.”

Surely if he didn't do it after Sophia, if he didn't do it after killing that crankhead or the first time he OD'd in the yard of the clubhouse or any of the times he woke up under Ginger, then it stands to reason it's not in his nature.

He shouldn't have bothered speaking – he doesn't look reassured.

“Let's hope the programming holds, then,” says Marty, opening his eyes again.

Crash has grown attached to Marty's eyes. They always stay precisely put, even when everything else is spinning out, trying to drag him into oblivion.


	2. Partners

So if none of it means anything, what's he supposed to make of Marty, then? It's a good question. Shit, man, it's a good question.

Near as Rust can figure, it's all fucking recursive.

His condition is highly sensitive to biochemical imbalances; stress plays a big role. Chrono-impairment works off the subconscious similar to dreaming – so he travels to places and times that tie back to his own personal history. Marty being the only real partner he's ever had, his partner during the biggest case of his career – well, it makes more sense when you look at it like that. Same as you can be forty and still have the odd dream about some little asshole you knew in high school, Rust travels to Marty.

It's important not to mistake a disruption of causality and the random firing of neurons in his brain for attachment. He wants the detectives clear on that point.

* * *

“Kind of a strange guy, huh,” says Papania, commiserating.

“Strange,” Marty repeats, and if either of the detectives plays poker, they'll probably recognize a tell when they see it – the dodged eye contact, the touching of the face. “Uh, yeah. That's one way of putting it.”

He doesn't try to explain how those years before they were partners meant something different to Rust than they did to Marty. He's not about to out himself.

Near as he can figure, Marty was a rest stop on the highway, never a destination – and Rust's final destination was as big of a mystery to him as it was to Marty, but that didn't matter none. Looking for an answer would have meant admitting he needed something, and by the time Rust came to Louisiana, he'd locked himself down. Man wouldn't admit he needed water if he was dying of thirst in the desert.

 

** Part II**

 

1994

His condition has no course of treatment, but North Shore seems like a Faraday cage built to his specifications. Time ticks by, regimented into daily doses he knocks back with glass after glass of faintly metallic water. The people there keep him apprised of the current date like owning a calendar is some form of therapy.

He is sober and everyone knows it; it is not a combination to which he is accustomed.

Distractions are light on the shelf: approved reading only. Bibles litter every room like they are meant to be used as coasters. Never was a convert like the bored and isolated, he thinks the first day – and the second, the third, the twentieth. But his eyes thirst for ink on a page, something tangible he can focus on past the neural damage. Eventually he gives in and peels back some onionskin.

Corinthians is where it's at, the words that finally feel relevant: _The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable._

He wonders if Marty Hart is the eye or the hand in this particular metaphor; he'd wonder which one of them is the weaker part, but he's always known the answer to that one.

So he turns down the psych pension. He tells them he wants to work homicide, and they set about finding some place that will take him. The dial turns, the lens lengthens; a picture slowly comes into focus. He is sent to Louisiana.

At last, Louisiana.

Marty's hair is the same hue as the burn-ready canefields that marked his drive across Texas and Louisiana the day before. At their official introduction, he grabs Rust's hand up to shake, and his eyes are unshadowed by all that is to come.

Looking at his smile, Rust feels something like disquiet.

* * *

On their first case together, their suspect takes off running through the back door of his shotgun shack home, and Rust follows like a greyhound that's seen the mechanical hare. He vaults over a fence and slams the man into a blue kiddie pool with enough force to rip the plastic sides down to the ground.

“Damn, Rust, look at you dance,” Marty crows as his new partner hauls the dripping perp over to the car.

Rust straightens his shirt and goes digging for a cigarette. His packet is soaked through, and the look he gives the man in the backseat is almost offended.

Rust pulls out his ledger in the car afterwards and Marty says, “So it was your casebook the whole time.”

Rust glances between him and the open notebook, frowning. Marty supposes those visits are still ahead for him, and vows to stop thinking about it before he gets confused.

He's not expecting much in the way of a response – Rust has been pretty quiet since settling in at the station – but to his surprise he says, a little abruptly, “I had a teacher in school who was into nature journaling, she got me in the habit. Thought it might help me orient myself.”

“Nature journaling?”

Rust lifts one shoulder, strangely hesitant. “Don't have to be nature. It's the process of observation: you notice something, you examine it, take in all the details you can. Then you start asking questions – why is it the way it is? Does it remind you of anything else?” Rust reaches back for his seatbelt, eyes trained anywhere but Marty. “Just so happens I've found it useful for the job.”

It dawns on him Rust might be actually _trying_ to have a conversation here. He nods slowly in consideration. Nature journaling. Huh.

“Maybe – don't tell the other guys at the station about that,” he suggests.

“Why would I?” Rust says, clearly mystified by the very notion.

After work, Marty invites him out for a drink with the guys.

Rust declines.

* * *

Marty’s time-dislocated visitors mostly taper off, like the one weirdo in his passenger seat is pushing all similarly charged weirdos away, magnet-style.

He is a little regretful about it; seems like all the other Rusts liked him more than the one he’s got now. The misfit from the Alaskan wilderness, the kid who drank whiskey while he was studying like others downed soda and coffee, even that older worn version who looked at Marty’s hair like there was something amusing about it (and yeah, Marty’s not an idiot, he gets it, he’s been getting it in the mirror for the past four years; fuck you, Rust). Those Rusts could be cautious, or skeptical, or even resigned about it, but all of them seemed to have some baseline affinity for him.

His partner in the present is by turns cold and silent, or he won’t shut the hell up, like the world isn’t struggling enough, it needs a good kick while it’s down. Rust pumps poison out like he needs to alter the air chemistry to survive.

Marty wasn't expecting driving to go from being an easy, uncomplicated zone of zen to something tense and occasionally combative. He's had this fucker in and out of his life for going on twenty years, and he still don't know what his deal is, why he’s gotta be this way.

And he keeps forgetting Rust is here to stay now; there will be no breaks or channel changes. He actually _misses_ those other Rusts. He knows they’re all the same man, but that man, he is learning hour-after-hour, day-after-day, trapped in a car with his cloud of cigarette smoke and arrogant psychobabble, is a self-righteous pain in his goddamn ass.

“Still moving in, huh,” he says when he swings by his house two weeks into their official partnership.

Rust gives him some vague non-answer; later, after months have slipped by, the sight of those empty rooms will grate on Marty's nerves. Their refusal to be filled with the trappings of a semi-permanent life feels like a premeditated broken promise, and elicits in Marty an emotion he'll come to understand as quintessentially Cohlean – disappointment even in the absence of expectation.

The whole situation is shaping up to be the biggest anticlimax of his life. Then they catch the big 419 outside Erath.

 

1995

It's a lot of stuff hitting him at once, is how he thinks about it.

The thing with Lisa started casual and flirty, but it gets a little more serious around the time Rust shows up in Louisiana – and not that anyone other than himself knows or cares, but Marty is pretty sure that's a coincidence.

He got over his weird fixation years ago; dug a hole and buried a time capsule, which he won't be uncovering again until he's maybe old and grey and safely can't get it up anymore. Let the decades pass and he is sure he'll find the capsule's well-thumbed contents funny: the musings on Rust's dreamy eyes; the distracting flutter of the inked wings on his forearm; the way Marty used to think intensely about how the man might look when sleeping, whether the severity of his mouth softened any.

He likes that he and Lisa can drink and have fun together without hearing regrets or a lecture for the rest of the week. Sometimes he is sure he reads need for him in her eyes, and he likes that too. The sex is great – uncomplicated, which feels like some flavor of right.

But then they got this woman's body posed in a canefield, some serious psychopath with flair type shit, nothing they've ever seen before that anyone at the station can remember.

For a man who professes to believe the world lacks meaning, Rust sure acts like someone who has found his purpose. The case draws all of his attention inexorably towards it, every angle another mystery to be unraveled. Which means through the transitive law of fuck-his-life it draws Marty's attention. It makes him sick to look at it, and angry to think about it, but it's got his attention.

All this combined with his lingering uncertainty over Rust's presence starts to exert certain stresses on the weak joints of his life. Marty from a couple years ago would have asked why he had weak points in the first place, but he's not Rust and doesn't have to answer to any younger smartass version of himself. He's got enough on his plate dealing with his present.

Somewhere in the back of his head, a timer starts ticking.

 

1995 (1999)

He's next to Marty outside interview room two, watching himself go at a heavily tattooed young man with methamphetamine scabs all up and down his forearms. A quick glance around the empty station festooned in gold and silver tinsel indicates an impending party.

“New Years,” he says, and is perhaps a little disgruntled when Marty doesn't so much as twitch in surprise.

“The new millennium,” Marty says. He glances over and casts a quick assessing look up at and down Rust's figure. He lingers on his hair and muses, “Yeah, think I liked that better. People didn't know you're an asshole until you opened your mouth. Gave me some wiggle room to work with.”

The Rust inside the room is sporting something near a crew cut and, regardless of Marty's opinion, Rust thinks it looks fine – professional, like maybe he's settled into the role some.

“I usually take lead in the box?” he asks, speaking around a cigarette. He reaches into his coat jacket for his lighter, but before he can grab it, Marty has one at the ready. He sparks it, cupping the end of the cigarette.

The move disconcerts him some, but he don't let on. It's 1999, which means they've made it five years. It's not so strange that Marty would take to carrying a lighter; the man is not entirely incapable of adapting.

“Yeah, you haven't done that yet? We found a rhythm. It works.” Marty's mouth hitches up. “Which do you think you are, good cop or bad cop?”

“Shit, Marty, I don't know. Kinda looks like I'm both.”

He huffs a laugh, stance shifting. “You're not wrong.”

Rust turns and looks around the station again, eyeing the massive computer monitors cluttering up their desks. He's not crazy about those. They block the line of sight between his chair and Marty's, will make communication harder than it already is. The darkened screens are a dull, depthless void and provoke a feeling opposite to the one provided by a blank page in his ledger.

Five years. He turns back to the window and watches Marty watch himself, looking for other clues of how they been. Five years is two years longer than his marriage to Claire, but yesterday Marty declared the car was a place of quiet reflection. It didn't bode well for their longevity.

Sometimes he wonders if he's not traveling though time so much as sliding into nearby dimensions; that might explain the content look on Marty's face right now.

He keeps waiting to be the man who belongs to him, but his edges never quite meet the outline. And every Marty he finds seems to be looking after whatever version of himself just left the room.

They don't speak again, and he's gone before he finishes his cigarette.

* * *

Having Rust over for dinner, introducing him to Maggie and the girls – maybe that was a mistake.

Marty has a good system, keeping his job and his life separate. It doesn't occur to him until it's too late how Rust finally syncing up might jeopardize it. It's like he's had an imaginary friend most of his life and then he turns thirty-five and this friend starts having opinions on the way he runs things in reality. Rust has a lot of fucking opinions.

“What do you actually know about him, Marty?” Maggie asks, once Rust has left the dining room to take a call and, hopefully, the excuse to get the hell out of here.

Marty thinks about Rust back on the floor of his room at the academy, bleeding out and completely insensate. His hands on the man, his fingers inside him, reaching under his skin.

He forks pasta into his mouth. He doesn't know what Maggie wants to hear, here. He's never liked talking about Rust with her – an impulse better left unexamined.

“Well, he could be a good detective – he's running with this thing. But, y'know,” he says with an easy shrug, “he's uppity.”

Going by the disbelief radiating from her eyes, she doesn't like this answer. “Haven't you ever asked him about himself?”

Now it's his turn to scoff, and the girls look between them, too young to find this volley anything but funny. He spares them a conspiratorial grin – if they think it's a joke, then he can too.

He leans forward and says to Maggie quietly, “I've known the man for a long time. Trust me, you do not want to pick his brain.”

Rust comes back to the table, forestalling further words on the subject. And he stays for the rest of dinner, because the man never could tell the appropriate time to stick around.

Maggie can't see Rust's problems clearly, is the problem. She thinks he's a fixer-upper, that's he just _sad_ and self-isolating. Set him up with the right woman and he'll bloom into a flower that'll learn to turn to the sun instead of away from it. It's a joke, a sad joke. She doesn't understand that the man's plain not stable. He is incapable of being accountable to himself, much less anybody else – never mind the time jumping, the man can't even drink anymore. He can't deal with the other detectives at the station, and he spends all his free time focusing on the case instead of getting a life.

It's been twenty years; Marty's got too many memories of Rust sleepless, high, and-or _bleeding_ to fall into some trap of positive thinking about what's gonna fix the guy. But Maggie gets after him like getting Rust laid is some kind of war effort he isn't pulling his weight on. And sure, a woman would probably do him good. A little fun never hurt anybody.

A couple days later in the car, Rust tells Marty he used to be married.

It's like hearing Mister Geppetto had a family before he made Pinocchio. But before he can muster any outrage, Rust tells him his little girl died. And something in Marty cuts out, goes to static.

“Your – your kid died?” he says, reeling, and he can hear it all in his voice, bleeding out every which way and none of it needed: the pain, of course, but also confusion, a kind of helpless bewilderment that sparks so hot and fresh, he hasn't a hope of concealing it.

It's just as well they're on a straight road, because he's driving blind here. He should probably pull over and turn to Rust, really talk to him about this.

(He can't even picture it: Rust holding a baby. Did he look at her and feel how Marty did, the first time he held Audrey? Did he ever lift a finger to tickle her tiny curled foot, or fall asleep with her on the couch, heartbeat-to-heartbeat? He must've smiled at her.)

“I'm sorry, man,” he says. “I – I'm so sorry.” That's what you always say, right, because what else can you possibly say? But this is different than any of those hypothetical times, because this is Rust – what do you say when it's _Rust_ , when it's someone you've known since –

 _Jesus_ –

“When did, I mean. When were you...?” He doesn't know what he's asking. He tries to piece it together, and the answer comes, horribly easy: “It was before you transferred to Narcotics. Before Crash.”

He realizes Rust hasn't said anything for a while, and looks over to find him gone from the passenger seat. Spirited away to some other place and time, very likely to some other Marty, who won't have a fucking clue.

Marty does pull over to the shoulder then, so he can pound the steering wheel and scream obscenities, express some of the deranged fury that's not acceptable to show company, even Rust.

First time I ever saw him, he thinks nonsensically. He stops the thought there. Marty should've known, _he should have recognized it_. He was broken when they met. They were broken when they met.

He scrubs a hand roughly over his face and clears his throat a few times before pulling back out onto the road. It's a long drive, and there are plenty of miles more to go before Rust needs to show up again.

Marty tells himself he won't press the man to talk; he tells himself he won't hold it against him when he doesn't.

* * *

It's one of those long, lagging spells in the middle of the Dora Lange case. Quesada is looking out his office window like he's never seen two more useless lumps, and Marty barely knows what day it is except that he might have some kind of recital or something he's got to be at later. He won't ask Rust because Rust never knows what day it is either unless he's consulting his ledger. Marty can't be consulting it too, one of them's got to be fucking sane and normal.

The timer in his head keeps ticking along, but he's lost track of what it was timing, if he ever knew.

He feels pulled in three directions – four if he counts the case separate from Rust, and some days that ain't easy. The levees are starting to fail on him, things keep bleeding over, and Rust pretends not to notice and does stupid uninterpretable shit like mow his fucking lawn.

Anyway, one of those long days, Marty throws a pen across the desks to get his attention and, once he's got it, he asks, “Why can't old-you just pop in and break the case?”

Rust dismisses him effortlessly, returning to his file. “Not how it works.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Marty says. “You told me to be ready for your gunshot wounds before you dropped in bleeding all over the place.”

 _That_ gets his attention. His eyes come up off his notes to focus fully on Marty. “I did?”

“Yeah. What, you don't remember that?” He was certainly high enough on the regular back then. His handler must've had a ball trying to get anything useful out of him.

A faint edge creeps into Rust's voice. “You're getting your timeline mixed up again.”

“ _Your_ timeline. I have a regular timeline, because I, unlike you, am a regular-ass dude.” He gets roundly ignored for this, but he sticks to it. “So what I want to know is, if you can do that, then why can't you give us both a break and say who the fuck's responsible for this mess?”

“I can't.” Rust's eyes aren't moving over the page anymore, he's not fooling Marty.

“You mean you won't.”

“Recall I'm the one who thinks this piece of shit's killed before. You think I'd let him get away with it, all for the sake of gratifying my intellectual curiosity?”

Marty rocks back in his chair. “Honestly? I don't know what you'd do, Rust. I keep thinking about that psychopathic little library of sex crimes and death you been keeping in your apartment, and how real-fucking-interested you are in the iconography of it all.”

They stare each other down. They've been talking low, preserving what amounts to privacy in the station, and the rest of the bullpen seems louder in the lag of the argument. Over Rust's shoulder, Geraci ties off a joke with a barking laugh, and the harsh sound of it seems to hit Rust like a broadside.

Some days all this place does is wear him down, and Marty can only watch. He doesn't know which he'd change if he could, the world or Rust.

Rust says woodenly, “I've tried. Warning myself. Must've tried a dozen different ways of telling myself about Sophia. It never mattered – I never remember hearing myself give the warning. There's no changing the past, Marty.”

He doesn't much look like he believes he can change the future, either.

Marty looks away. It's the only privacy he can give him. “Enough to save your life, though,” he points out to his stapler, voice as hushed as Rust's had been.

“Says you.”

“Says the three healed holes decorating your midriff.”

“Marty, it's not like you to refuse credit for a heroic deed.” Rust's eyes are narrow and intent. After a lengthy pause, he says, “Iconography, huh.”

He recognizes the tone. “Oh, shut up.”

They go back to their files and read a while longer. Marty gets up to get a refill on his coffee, and grabs one for Rust too, because maybe he does feel a little bad for implying he was willing to let an occult ritual serial killer roam free.

Rust accepts the mug without so much as a glance of thanks, so Marty doesn't know why he fucking bothers.

“Why did you think I would remember?” Rust says after a few minutes have passed. “What made you think it already happened?”

Marty's nonplussed. “Well – I guess 'cause you were in your strung out biker getup.” And finally, watching that hit Rust like a hard right hook, the thoughts finally start connecting. “Wait – ”

“Yeah.” Rust's gone blank-faced, expression wiped fastidiously clean of all emotion like he'd been when he first showed up at the CID all those months back. “At some point, I must go back in.”

 

1995 (1982)

Alaska, late autumn or thereabouts. He swore he'd never come back but all too often he isn't given a choice in the matter. And people wonder why he doesn't like being told what to do.

His black corduroy blazer is heavyweight in Louisiana but practically summer clothing up here. The wind cuts through the wales in the cloth, and he holds himself tight, bracing for it.

His teenage self is chopping wood. He pauses to take Rust in and tap the cigarette he's trying to multitask with. After a cursory inspection, he sticks the cigarette back in the corner of his mouth and turns around to resume setting up the next log.

He says over his shoulder, as if picking up a dropped conversation, “So last time I zipped out – ”

His breath comes out short in irritation. “Don't say zipped. We don't zip.”

The kid bring his maul down on the wood, and it splints apart with a loud crack. He's working without gloves, the skin on his hands red and chapped a layer down. Rust remembers spending six months out of the year with hands like that, always dry and subtly aching.

“I saw a boy last time – a guy,” the kid says, ignoring him but for a brief glare. “And I'm pretty sure I've seen him before. Several years ago.”

“Alright,” says Rust, not particularly interested in hearing some hermitic hopeful ode about the dream of Marty Hart right now.

The kid shifts back, the heavy tool in his hand swinging down by his side. “Well, who is he?”

“Someone we know.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. Where is he?”

Rust considers the question, whether he should answer it. He's at that age when Rust was getting ready to flee south. He remembers thinking about going to Louisiana straight off, but eventually the lure of finding his mother dragged his bearing east to Texas.

“Louisiana.”

“Is that where I end up? Is that where you came from, just now?” he asks. When Rust shrugs, his lips thin with frustration. “What's it like?”

“It's shit,” says Rust.

The kid thumbs out the tip of his cigarette, pinches the butt off and tucks it into the pocket of his heavyweight denim jacket. He looks down to hide his face, but Rust recognizes the slant of his mouth, sees it in the bathroom mirror of the station often enough.

If Marty was here, he'd probably rattle off some comforting lie to the kid. He is good for a hand on the shoulder, always reaching out to people, warm and personable. It's a useful skill for a partner to have: the ability to play the good man. But Marty isn't here, and Rust can't start trying to play it his way; one of them's got to be lucid and honest.

“What good is this?” the kid asks him. He has another log set up to chop but he ignores it in favor of staring at Rust, face tight. “What am I supposed to get out of this, seeing you, seeing that we're still so fucking _miserable_ after however-many-years?”

Rust's stiff hands ball into fists in his blazer pocket. Visiting himself when he's this young is always a trial; Rust resents the pathetic quest for happiness and the idea that he has failed to meet his naive expectations.

He says, “Proof of life, motherfucker.”

* * *

“I don't believe a man can love,” Rust tells him in the car one day. “Least not in the way he means. Inadequacies of reality always set in.”

He leans forward to look idly out the windshield, like _inadequacies_ isn't now rolling around in Marty's head, like Marty isn't aware he is the only constant in Rust's life. It feels like a specially engraved fuck-you.

Rust gives the coast thirty years. Marty wonders how long he'd give their partnership.

* * *

He's alone in the office, having sent Rust home to prepare for Maggie's double date – a process Marty wants to know as little about as possible. He imagines it involves a partial brain transfusion.

He looks up at movement in Rust's chair and finds himself facing his first visitor in months.

This Rust is maybe older than he's ever seen him, or at the very least rougher. His hair is long and tangled, his face weathered. He's clean-shaven, but that's the only sign of recent grooming Marty can see. He's also drunk – he recognizes the glaze and sluggish delay of his eyes as they look Marty up and down. It makes him feel a little queasy to see it. This Rust’s like a deer been hit on the side of the road, struggling to stand on broken legs. But what hit him? Why'd he let it happen? Marty's really not in the mood to get after Rust for his fucked up life choices just now, not after the month he's had.

He slams his drawer closed and sits back in his chair, glaring. “Do we ever close this fucking case? Is it ever gonna be _over_ , or do I actually die trying to solve it and you've just been holding out on me all these years?”

Rust blinks at him, slow and cold like a lizard. “That's a good question, kid. I'm beginning to think nothing's ever really fucking over. Like me and you.” A stream of smoke pours out from his mouth; Marty hadn't noticed the cigarette in his hand.

Rust continues dully, “Nothing ever changes. Even when, by all reasonable measure of probability, it should. I still wind up here, looking across at your clueless lantern-jawed face.”

The offense barely registers. He's too used to Rust to do anything but shrug it off and get back to work. He grabs a file at random, one of the many salvaged unsolved DBs his partner has insisted on looking through.

But he can't focus on it, not with Rust sitting there, looking like that. He squints at him. “What's with you, anyway? You go UC in some trucking ring? Did you retire? 'Cause I know I'm not driving that hair of yours around.”

Rust's shoulders lift and fall, indifferent. “Been working fishing boats.”

Marty throws the file back down with a decisive slap. “All the times I've tried to get you to go fishing and you've told me to fuck off, and now you mean to tell me you've taken it up as a second vocation?”

“Maybe I've had it all wrong,” Rust says to the air, as if Marty hadn't spoken. “Maybe I'm not the one with the dysfunctional relationship to time – it's you. Your self-absorption pierced the fourth dimension and its gravity well somehow snagged me up. Round and round I go, a decaying orbit to your endless self-regard.”

Right. Marty shakes his head. “You know what? I can't take this tonight.” He gets up and reaches for his jacket. He puts it on, staring Rust down and daring him to say something. “All the years you've been bouncing in and out of my life, I ever walk out on you?”

Old Rust stares at him, seeming interested in spite of himself. His mouth slants up. “No,” he says, sounding almost surprised but mostly just bitter. “Not to my recollection.”

“Well, here you go, Rust. Just for you.” He swipes his keys and heads for the door, calling over his shoulder, “Something changed.”

* * *

It becomes apparent within the first sixty seconds of the date that Maggie and Marty have debriefed Jennifer on his assorted conditions. He imagines they told themselves they were being helpful.

“So does that mean you know the future?” she asks him with a flirtatious smile.

Rust wishes with uncommon force to travel right then and there, but his atoms remain stubbornly pinned to their baseline time.

The dance floor at his back smells of desperation and sour beer. He hasn't had enough sleep in recent weeks to make sense of the melody of the country western music; it sounds like heavy traffic on a busy intersection. If forced to dance, he's confident he can find the rhythm, but it'll be mere marking time – the metronome of a drum major rather than the heartfelt flourish of an orchestral conductor. Jennifer will very likely be disappointed.

Which is all to say: the double date with the Harts goes about as well as he expected.

Marty tries to pour him a pint and then makes a big production of returning it to the pitcher – trying perhaps, for some typically blockheaded reason, to embarrass him. A little later he catches sight of some skirt across the room and they all are forced to spend the rest of the evening pretending none of them noticed.

Rust doesn't look at Maggie throughout; he has lost track of which one of them is doing the other a favor tonight, and eye contact might force the issue.

The date ends like a last minute stay of execution, and they part gratefully to return to their lives, or so Rust imagines. Maggie goes home to the girls, Marty dives dick-first into self-destruct mode, and Rust goes back to his stack of mutilated DBs.

In one of the manila folders languishes Rianne Olivier, a drowning victim with a familiar spiral on her posterior.

* * *

The problem with liking a little bit of wildness – a spitfire, someone who takes no shit – is this: some days Marty has nothing but shit to dish.

Panic and a burgeoning hangover settle like hard water sediment over the surface of his life, and every moment thereafter carries the aftertaste of catastrophe. In many ways, landing on Rust's doormat like a refugee feels like the inevitable culmination of everything his life's been circling for the past year. With his father gone and his family blown apart, it's almost a relief: giving up on normalcy and decent living to become someone who drinks every day and sleeps on an air mattress. Someone who's main source of conversation is a man who is not-so-secretly out of his fucking mind.

Rust doesn't give a shit about what Marty's going through, seems to think he has nothing to do with it neither. Could be he's taking the long view; another possibility is he really doesn't care. Marty doesn't know anymore.

He tries to remember how old Rust was when he told him he didn't end up alone, but between the heartache (and the drinking) and the case (and the drinking), it's difficult to focus. And having this Rust's uncompromising face front and center in his narrowed world makes it impossible to picture any other version – especially one that looks at him with sympathy.

But Rust doesn't let him fall apart completely; he pulls Marty relentlessly away from the burning crash site of his life and brings him back to the case. And maybe there's something wrong in Marty that calls out to the thing wrong in Rust, because Marty goes along with it.

He doesn't know when he'll next see his daughters, for fuck's sake, but he goes along with it. Didn't he hold each of them in the hospital and swear they were the center of his world? Hadn't he dandled them on his knee and claimed to never need anything but their smiles? _The case, Marty. The fucking case. Yeah, all right._

Rust says it's just gonna be the two of them out there. He's so calm about it, Marty almost accuses of him of knowing this was coming, but he remembers the look on the man's face in the office the other day.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asks that first night, as the shock and inebriation start to come together enough to make the room spin. He must be drunk, to let Rust do this, to think it's the most logical course of action.

“Not exactly,” says Rust.

It doesn't hit Marty until he's fingering the holes in the familiar leather jacket but it's maybe the closest Rust's ever come to admitting doubt.

* * *

“You should get some color in here,” he says one evening, from his vantage point on the floor. “Put some posters up or something.”

He's managed to pour his whiskey into an actual glass instead of drinking from the bottle like an animal. This is what passes for homey in Rust's neck of the woods. The drink is on the floor beside his head, and he gets a sharp whiff of it every time he angles a look at Rust standing over by the kitchen counter.

“This ain't your dorm room, Marty.”

Rust probably has a clearer memory of said room than him, having been in it a lot more recently. Marty only remembers one specific poster he had on his wall.

“Mm, Bo Derek,” he says, the drink making him a little sentimental. His hand is lying heavy along his belt buckle. He's a shade over warm, but feeling too lazy to do anything about it.

Rust doesn't have anything to add to that. He is intent on his work, mixing powders. More white.

“Was it growing up in Alaska, all that snow? Or do you just prefer the taste of it?” he wonders aloud. He blinks: once, twice. Stretches his eyelids wide to prove he's still awake and not in some kind of alcoholic coma.

“What're you saying, kid?”

There's the other thing, the _kid_ thing; this isn't the first time Rust has called him that in the past week.

Marty's never really been much of an actor or ever gone undercover at all, so he doesn't know if Rust is trying to get back into character as Crash or if he is actually getting his timelines a little confused. It's certainly got _Marty_ confused, his torn-out heart and perpetual half-buzzed state colliding with memory associations and producing one very confused dick. He mostly tries to ignore it.

The ceiling is actually a slightly different shade of white than the walls, he notices. More of a cream.

A disheveled head appears in his line of sight. Rust looms over him, frown formidable and unamused. “You're a mess.”

Which is rich, coming from a man with fake track marks in his elbow.

“I'm allowed.” He shuffles his skull slightly against the floor so Rust's head is blocking the overhead light. It back lights that errant curl reaching out from his forehead, gives him a bit of a halo. St. Rust, patron saint of assholes and junkies.

Rust says, “You ever think maybe that's your problem, your first impulse to any situation being _I'm allowed_?”

“No,” he replies reflexively. He reaches out and curls a hand around Rust's ankle, slipping in below the too-long hem of his jeans.

The insistent timer in his head slows and stops.

He blinks slowly up at him. “Do you think I was smarter when I was younger?” Surely Rust, of all people, would be able to judge.

Rust doesn't need a second to make the jump to the new topic. “I think you lied to yourself less.”

Marty doesn't know what that means. He absently rubs Rust's ankle, kind of fascinated by its composition, the way the leg hair completely stops above the joint bone, like someone took a straight edge and drew a line. No hair allowed past this point.

“Maggie said I was smarter.”

“I don't want to hear this,” Rust reminds him, because he's a prick.

Marty can't read his expression too well, beyond the frown. He eyes are intent and very dark on Marty; could be the lighting, could also be the coke he clearly thinks Marty didn't see him take a bump from fifteen minutes ago.

He squeezes his hand a little. “C'mere.”

“No,” Rust says automatically. Then: “What for?”

Marty raises his free hand in the air, and the ice clinks in the glass. “Contemplate the brilliance of your ceiling with me.”

“And why would I do that?” It's such an obvious stalling line, Marty should probably be concerned about him going back into the field.

“Nothing else to fuckin' do in this place.” He squeezes again, and Rust yanks his leg away, sharpish like some kind of reverse kick. But he clambers down and stretches out on the floor next to him. The glass of whiskey sits safely between their heads: a boundary line, a neutral zone. A hurdle for someone to jump.

Smoke curls up from Rust's cigarette, and now they've got grey on off-white. Practically a laser show, Rust's house.

“You're a disruptive presence,” Rust murmurs through lips pinched around the cigarette, somehow expertly avoiding ashing his own face. He trains a slit-eyed glare at the ceiling, like it offends him.

Marty grunts, careless. “That right?”

“Yeah. You interrupt my thinking.”

Marty levers up on one elbow so he can take another drink. This puts him sort of hovering over Rust, who stubbornly persists in not looking at him. His eyelashes are a dark, protective fringe, concealing his eyes. The tendons in his forearms are tensed and taut, like he's anticipating a fight.

Marty stalls out in the air, wavering, looking at the familiar severe lines of his face. He thinks about leaning down. He wonders if Rust would let him.

Then he finally processes what they were talking about and he laughs. “Wait, is that supposed to be a bad thing?”

Rust shoves his elbows as he sits up, and Marty nearly face-plants onto his whiskey glass.

* * *

When this started, he didn't think what it would mean, that he'd be living with _Crash_. He had some weird, fucked up dreams that were kinda similar to this back when he was a teenager, but they involved a lot more sex and a lot fewer ash-filled coffee mugs.

“Oh, for – I wasn't done with this,” he shouts in the general direction of the bathroom. He dumps the ruined coffee down the sink and vindictively slaps the faucet on, muttering to himself. Rust showers on unbothered, so his hot water heater must be more efficient than the one Marty has back home.

It's unsettling, seeing him high on the regular again. Marty was finally starting to get used to the buttoned-up version of his partner and now here he is changing on him once more.

Rust goes out to reestablish his presence in the gearhead scene and comes swinging back in at 3 or 4 in the morning, slamming cupboards on the first floor and talking loudly to the empty room, narrating his plans or his general unified theory of white trash. Sometimes Marty slouches downstairs, operating on some vague interrupted-sleep directive that Rust needs watching, and he'll stand blinking in the doorway of the main room, scratching at the waistband of his boxer shorts. More often, he jerks awake and lies in bed listening to Rust talk, trying and usually failing to make the words out through the walls.

“So what do the Iron Crusaders think about Crash's Scott Bakula impression?” he asks four days in, over laundry.

He has the hamper out. He hoped he might actually get around to doing something about folding the shirts if he didn't feel quarantined in the laundry room, which is somehow even more unsettlingly blank than the rest of the house. Marty wants to spend as little time as possible inside it. This strategy has notably failed to furnish results so far; the creases in his shirts are looking permanent enough to plot on a map.

Rust had been doing pushups, but now he turns his head and stares at Marty silently. Fucker holds the position too, but at least his face goes slightly red from the strain.

After a long silence, Marty guesses, “You're trying to figure out who Scott Bakula is.”

The flash frown proves him right. Rust resumes doing pushups. After five, he says, “Something to do with time travel, I figure. Otherwise what possible relevance could it have to me.”

“Great, you deduced a reference every other person in America would have understood immediately. So?” he says. “What do you tell them? I mean, didn't it ever create any issues in the field?”

He's not expecting Rust to let out that scoffing half-laugh of his, the one that immediately prods at Marty's temper. Those associated memories and all.

“Goddamn, Marty. You are something else.”

Rust gets up and walks over to the hamper, starts digging around. Marty looks at him and tells himself he's not feeling territorial about the fucking laundry. He was doing his whites – it made sense to grab Rust's tanks and add them to the load.

He watches Rust's corded, sweat-sheened forearm dip into the clean hamper. Looking to stave off complete insanity, he says belatedly:

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” says Rust, finally retrieving one of his tanks and slinging it over his shoulder like a gym towel, “you spent years getting the drop-in from me, and you never once thought to ask how I was swinging it. With the gearheads, or my old office.”

He walks out, headed for the bathroom and a shower.

“Maybe I just trusted you had your shit figured out,” he shouts after him, wanting to get the final word at least.

The bathroom door slams shut and he sighs; yeah, he wouldn't have believed that line either.

 

1995 (1983)

Marty Hart at the LSP Training Academy is solid thing.

He walks like the hot piece of rodeo ass he so recently was. The jeans slung over his desk chair have a circular dent in the back right pocket, so he hasn't yet kicked his chew habit. His hair is brutally short, still recovering from the academy barber buzz; it's so reminiscent of how he'll look when he's decades older, Rust feels a pang of misguided nostalgia.

Marty hurries to shut the door to his room before any of the other cadets spot Rust lounging on the end of his bed.

“Jesus, Crash,” he hisses, tossing his towel down on the floor. “What the fuck you doing, showing up here?”

Rust purses his lips and lets the smoke stream out. He studies the blunt tip of the cigarette, because it's either look at that or his twenty-three-year-old partner. He's low on sleep and recently high on coke cut with something more DIY than designer. He don't need this kind of sensory confusion.

“I'm not in a position to recall what you do or do not yet know about how this works. But I don't control it. Showing up here.” He waves his cigarette. “Now.” He drags the word out. Amused by it and its multiplicity of meaning.

Marty stands in front of him with his hands on his boxer-clad hips, and it's funny, really, because his older self stood looking at him just like this yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before?

“Do you control your fuckin' legs?” Marty inquires. “Something stopping you from getting up and closing the door so no one sees you and starts wondering why the academy's most promising cadet has a greaser stowaway?”

He only smiles lazily back in response. Marty darts a glance at his mouth and twists his whole body away, cursing. The back of his neck has gone red, which he tries to cover up by dragging a T-shirt over his admirable chest.

He's always faintly surprised at how obvious Marty is when he's young. How did this kid avoid getting the shit beat out of him on the regular?

He supposes it's possible he _didn't_ go through life side-eying other boys in the locker room and watching them with such clear-eyed want – that this transparency is limited to Rust. He is skeptical about all forms of exceptionalism, but Marty makes it to married middle age with his heterosexual reputation intact. It's a real mystery.

Marty starts talking fast. He's nervous and the novelty is enough to sharpen Rust's focus. He feels not a little like a bloodhound catching a scent.

In the back of his mind, he idly tries to work out if this Marty has kissed him yet.

“You know, I, uh. Started seeing this girl – well, we knew each other before, at USL. She moved away and now she's back, and it's. It's going real good, I think. Her name's Maggie.” Marty clears his throat and sneaks a look at Crash. “You, uh. You know her?”

He looks at Marty and thinks very carefully about saying nothing. About anything. Rules of probability dictate he'd probably survive the Port of Houston shootout anyway.

It would, however, put this blushing optimistic kid in a pretty tight spot when Crash drops in on him, bleeding out from three bullet wounds. Marty doesn't do well with unoccupied hands, and he tends to think of himself as the center of every moment. Odds on this combination go, he'd finally choose something in life to blame himself for. It's an irritating thought.

“Rust?” Some of the hope's gone out of his face now. He should know better than to read anything into his responses or non-responses. He'll learn in a decade or so.

“You're gonna want to pick up some first responder training,” he says at last.

As a distraction from all-things-Maggie, it works. Crash has always been pretty good at distractions.

* * *

“You ain't doing this without me,” Marty says to Rust outside Ledoux's cookhouse.

His blood is pumping, the end of this life-ruining case is finally in sight, and maybe that's why the words come out with all the finality of a wedding vow. Maybe after everything, a part of him still means them that way.

They move on the cookhouse, perfectly in sync like all their lives were training exercises for this day. Marty looks at Rust across grass and through glass and reads his thinking clear like he's tuned to his shortwave channel.

He doesn't need Rust to tell him he fucked up after he came back out of the shed with his gun burning to expel a bullet. It's in the brace of his hand on Marty's shoulder afterwards, the knowledge in his dark eyes – maybe a callback to his own moment of reckless retribution years ago.

Marty has sundered his life in two; there is everything he was and had before he killed a man, and there is the unknown remainder stretching out before him, a different kind of afterlife.

* * *

The first day after the clusterfuck they are reporting as a shootout, Marty wakes up beside Rust. He'd mindlessly convoyed to his bed the night previous, not trusting the other man not to trip and break his neck or something. Rust didn't say a word about it and they both fell asleep more or less instantly, still wearing their filthy clothes from the raid.

Now they are sprawled over his sad floor mattress, smelling like hell and gunpowder. Marty's brain is slowly rising up out of the settled fog of the case being over. He's not thinking so much as reacting when he turns around on the mattress, leans over, and covers Rust's mouth with his own.

Rust kisses him back.

He does. Marty would swear on it, because hope might lie but the thrill of victory is unmistakable. It lasts all of three delirious, heady seconds: Rust's right knee drifting up and just barely brushing at Marty's hip, his body curling towards him like it's never wanted to do anything else.

Then Rust performs a full-body flinch and rolls off the mattress. His absence is so sudden, it's almost like he traveled, leaving a vacuum of displaced air in his wake for Marty to fall into.

Rust keeps his head turned away as he gets up. A few seconds later Marty hears the snap of a lighter.

Marty doesn't say anything. He puts his head down on the mattress and presses his clenched fists against his temples like bookends of aching shame and frustration, and he doesn't care that Rust sees him do it.

They never speak about it. In the face of everything else they have going at the time, Marty tells himself it doesn't really matter.

All told, he lives with Rust for almost two months. It's long enough to get irritated with his habits; he keeps the toaster put away in the cupboard and never refills the ice tray. He runs the thermostat two degrees hotter than necessary. When they run out of coffee or filters, he reuses the last one in the machine, like he doesn't notice the bitter, watery taste.

Marty gets used to the smell of cigarettes first thing in the morning.

They formulate their own silent shorthand for communication; they find the bleeding edge of versatility when it comes to deploying the middle finger.

Marty drags himself to Promise Keepers and tries to ease back on the drinking; Rust disappears for long drives along the coast. They don't carpool most days and they don't hang out after work – but they end up under the same roof at the end of every night. It's something less like friends or roommates and more like family: the unquestioned presence and comfort of another person in the house. Marty sleeps better when he's heard Rust come in.

And every once in a while, unplanned and never discussed, they find themselves sitting outside behind the house to watch the stars.

Marty doesn't buy any furniture or outfit the room he's occupying, but he does get a real mattress and box spring. He figures it can be a guest bed after he moves back in with his girls. A week after he moves out, he drives past Rust's from sheer habit and spies it angled up beside the garbage, waiting to be hauled away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got a True Detective sideblog over at brokentaillight.tumblr.com, in case anyone wants to shout about these two rednecks with me.


	3. Ghost & Fraud

Useless facts about Marty Hart clutter up Rust's head like stacks of old newspapers in a hoarder's hovel; the sentiment attached to them is sincere, but he is not ruling it out as a symptom of underlying mental problems.

A random sampling: Marty's habitual jutted jaw is the product of chewing tobacco from the ages of fourteen to twenty-three (and he still smuggles the odd plug when he's stressed); he had a short tenure as a downcountry tough until his father let him get thrown into the drunk tank overnight when he was seventeen; after he blew his pitching elbow in college, he considered going into journalism (Marty probably could see himself as a newspaperman: whiskey in the drawer, a town worth of contacts on a rolodex); he doesn't know it, but it's embarrassingly obvious when he's had sex (it's all in the slow, ponderous gait and the way he sticks his nose in his coffee like a bear just woke up from hibernation); he was secretly relieved when they found out Maisie was going to be another girl (he wouldn't have a ready-made excuse if he didn't bond easily with a boy).

In sum: nothing particularly special and plenty of it a little sad. All the shades of Marty's life through the years have been good for one thing – they were study material for the box.

Everybody's got doubts and hopes, secret yearnings and repeat failures. Everybody knows something's wrong with them. Marty was a Rosetta Stone for understanding other people. He made up some for Rust's foundational lack of socializing.

But Marty was a flawed template. First time he ever fired his gun in the field was to murder an unarmed, handcuffed man. Don't matter that Rust has no moral compunction about it – _Marty_ _did_. He didn't talk about it when it was just the two of them, and he compensated for this silence by never shutting up in mixed company.

He built a CV of lies in hope of turning them into the real deal: hero, good father, loyal husband. Deep down, he suspected he was a fraud. And this roiled around until the friction produced a galvanic reaction – out came spurts of violence and frantic charm.

Years piled up and even this knowledge got forgotten. Covered up, inside-job. Bury the sin in the cracks of the foundation and try to build a life on top of it – that was Marty all over. By extension, it was Rust. Difference between them was, he remembered what was down there.

What is intimacy but becoming an involuntary accessory to another man's disappointment?

* * *

 Marty's knowledge of Rust maybe doesn't amount to much on the page. Man could be downright chatty at the worst of times, but you ask him a direct question about himself or his history, you were lucky to get a far-eyed single syllable in answer.

So Marty doesn't know where Rust went to school or if he has any cousins, what age he was when he lost his virginity. But he still _knew_ him. Better than anybody, he'd be willing to bet. He knew by the look in his eyes when he was thinking something through and should be left alone; by the flinch at the corner of his mouth when he was about to say something that was gonna cause trouble. He could always tell when he hadn't slept and tried fervently to block out what he looked like on mornings after he had sex. He even knew how Rust liked to dress his burger.

There are a thousand different ways to know someone, and Marty figures he had at least a few of them down when it came to Rust Cohle. But somewhere in those years, it's like Rust forgot that.

“People change, relationships change,” Marty tells the detectives. The problem being, of course: they don't. Rust would say they don't.

“Keep in touch?”

“No,” Marty says, and he notices the quick look the two detectives exchange. “Look, however we – Rust was a good detective. However we ended, I don't hold grudges. I believe that's the shit that leads to cancer.”

The version of Rust Cohle haunting his life is what taught him to compartmentalize. He could've sat around and thought himself into circles of panic and doubt, but instead he got on with life, because what else could he do? He's not Rust – given the privilege of zipping back and forth through life so all of it feels real and fresh all the time. His past is not alive the way it is for the other man. Sometimes he thinks his future ain't either.

“There's a feeling, you might notice it sometimes,” he says to them, working his way slowly through the words. “Like the future is behind you. Like it's – always been behind you.”

The two detectives look at him with polite attention, so maybe that's just him and the old affliction: the ghost of Christmas Future and Past and every other day in between. He hasn't seen Rust Cohle in ten years, but he's here even when he's not. Marty could turn around at any moment and find himself looking into the other man's nicotine gaze. Every passing second without this happening is a source of both massive relief and bottomless anger, but it's an old wound, as healed as it's gonna get.

Cancer can do you fast or slow, but there are other ways of dying. There's starvation, being cut off from what you need. There's loneliness so encompassing, it'll sap your strength and steal your energy.

That'll do you in, too.

 

** Part III **

 

(1996) 1994

Marty lurches awake a couple hours before dawn. His eyes are sore and wet, cheeks tacky with sweat, and his pulse has migrated to his ears and is making itself known in the form of a killer headache. A half-caught sob is trying to escape his chest, but with wakefulness comes full control. He locks the sob back down and tries to change it out for air.

Maggie's just off a shift transition at work, graveyard to second, and she doesn't stir as he gets out of bed and quietly leaves the bedroom.

He gets a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and stands braced at the sink sipping it. He thinks of the bottle of whiskey sitting up behind the recipe books above the stove. His tongue practically curdles from a fierce want for something other than this flat nontaste. He keeps drinking the water.

Rust is a dark figure in the shadows when he turns around.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” he whisper-shouts after the initial rush of violent panic recedes. “You trying to give me a heart attack?”

“You're the one standing around with the lights off,” Rust points out. He's wearing a nondescript shirt and jeans, but something about the way he's holding himself makes Marty think of Crash.

He leans over the counter island and rubs his face. “What the hell's wrong with you, man?”

Rust flanks the counter, making a slow approach to Marty but pretending like he ain't, like he merely wants to study the kitchen walls more closely. Hell, maybe he does. Marty can't remember if Rust saw this house before he got to Louisiana for real.

“Too many things to count.”

“No way you haven't tried counting them,” he says, and is surprised by the slight smile he garners.

He must be on something. Rust always likes him more when he's not sober.

“You're looking,” Rust says, voice low, slotting into place at his side, “uncharacteristically spooked?”

“Rough sleep.” Marty sees it all when he closes his eyes: the shed, the kids. The half-destroyed face of Ledoux. It makes his bed feel like a shaky lifeboat about to tip. “Fucked up dreams.”

Rust's face is angled down, his eyes intent on Marty's hands. He's got the same look when he's sketching details from a crime scene, which feels fitting. Marty's hands are part of a crime scene.

He asks, “Do you regret killing that tweaker in Houston?”

Rust's slight pause is the only sign betraying his surprise at Marty's knowledge. His reply comes slow, like the words are being dredged from the bottom of a lake. “Most days, I don't even remember I did it. Don't feel any connection between that fuck up and where I ended up. Way I figure, I'm paying for sins of a different kind.”

He's still ruminating over Marty's hands. But when Marty doesn't say anything, Rust rakes his gaze up. His eyes are black in the dim room.

“You kill someone, Marty?”

Rust has told him it does no good, but he has to try. He'll wonder forever if he doesn't.

“Can you – listen, when we catch the Dora Lange case, you need to be the one who goes into the shed. Just – remember that, okay? It needs to be you. You'll do it right, I know you will.”

He nods once: there. It's done.

But when he looks up again, Rust's mouth is curling up, but it's not a smile.

“What?”

“Marty, you ever try something like this before? Warning me of some shit, anything like that?”

“Not exactly.” For some reason, he thinks back to another night in another kitchen, him telling Rust they were going to be partners in the future. Right before he tried kissing him. It feels like a lifetime ago. “I mean, no. Don't think so.”

“Well, you don't think so and I wouldn't remember, so I guess we just have no way of knowing.”

The burgeoning feeling of success suffers a puncture and slow deflation. “You're saying you won't remember this?”

Rust reaches around, easy as you please, and gets a hold on the back of Marty's head. His palm cups his skull, calloused thumbs tucking behind his ears. Marty lets him. The impulse to pull away grapples with the one that wants to stay exactly where he is. It is outclassed on almost every count.

Rust leans in like he's sharing a secret, eyes flickering. He breathes into his mouth, “I won't remember any of this. But you will.”

Marty's eyes slam shut and he does pull away, then; millimeters of grace between him and whatever this is.

“What the hell, Rust? You know I'm married, right?”

Rust swings like a hinge against the counter, hand still in the air, face perfectly blank. “Don't think I do, actually,” he says. He lets his hand drop. “Guess I still won't, when I go back.”

Rust is barely more than a shadow. He's not here, not really. And things have been good lately, Marty reminds himself. Better, anyway. If not for the dreams, he could say he's the luckiest man in the world.

The luckiest man in the world, he thinks again. He can still feel Rust's fingerprints along the back of his neck.

“Hey Rust,” he says.

Rust is studying the walls of the kitchen closely, like this is a safari of middle America. “Hm?”

“Anyone ever tell you, you need to work on your timing?”

He tries a grin on and Rust squints at it. “Is that a joke?”

The grin collapses into a scowl. “Yeah, and it's a funny one. I mean, goddamn.”

“There are some upsides to forgetting this conversation, I suppose,” Rust reflects. Before Marty can shove or cuff him for that, Rust angles a sidelong look at him. The slow curving smile is Crash's, all bad ideas and abandon. “Have anything else you want to say to me that I won't remember?”

For such a supposedly smart guy, he really could be astoundingly stupid sometimes; when has Marty ever wanted Rust to forget anything about him.

 

1999

Audrey starts running a temperature of 101 three hours before the latest attempt at a double dinner date, and the Harts decide to stay home with her.

Their absence opens up the air in the room – no one around to explain Rust but Rust himself; no one to press for answers except Laurie if she chooses. She doesn't press and he doesn't explain, not then, and they agree to a second date.

Laurie is brutally pragmatic in that beat-nickel way of doctors. Like Rust, she has battled death and lost and forced herself to keep going afterward. When she looks into his eyes, he finds he doesn't need to look away.

Marty clearly doesn't know how to react to the new paradigm. He bounces between confused relief and awkward jokes, keeps checking with Rust like he might transform into a man who trades ball and chain stories around the water cooler when Marty's not looking.

“So you two are close?” she asks early on, understandably confused about the conflicting evidence she has seen. “Been partners long?”

The answer to both questions: a highly qualified _kind of_.

Eventually he tells her about the traveling. It becomes necessary when he tosses his casebook down on her coffee table one evening and a square photograph comes winging out from between the pages to land on the carpet.

Laurie picks the photo up to hand back to him, and her expression turns quizzical. “Is that Marty?”

Rust has never seen the picture before. He glances at it and immediately understands – he remembers Marty a couple weeks previous, twenty and buzzed and messing around with his new Kodamatic, shoving in close and snapping a picture before Rust could eel away. In the strange chemical dye of the instant film, neither of them look quite human. The whites of their eyes are too yellow, their skin too shiny. Marty's broad grin is a crooked blur, caught forever in the moment of triumph at his successful sneak snapshot.

“He looks so young,” Laurie comments, the question clear in her voice. Multiple questions.

Rust tells her his truth. In the subsequent Q&A, he slips the photograph safely back into his casebook.

 

2000

Aside from a programming headache most of the world doesn't really comprehend, there is nothing objectively different between the one year and the next, between the twentieth century and the twenty-first. It is greeted with the same boozy laughter, the manic late-hour cheer sliding into early hangovers, the desperate snatched kisses and elaborate tallying of promises already broken.

The future is all anyone can talk about, but as January matures, Rust thinks he notices a suspicion in the air, a creeping worry something has gone subtly wrong.

 _The new millennium!_ Wasn't it supposed to be different?

Weren't we supposed to be healthier? Happier? What happened to mankind's moonshot potential; will our optimism not see us through? Why are we still working the same pointless jobs? Why does love still elude us? We were promised either death or utopia. We don't care what the answer is, so long as it is simple.

People aren't built for a real reckoning; they will learn to ignore these feelings and move on. But for a brief moment at the beginning of the century, he is not alone with his doubts.

This is not a new dawn. It is later than you think.

 

2002 (1995)

Their split isn't even about kids, not really – except in the way kids are everything, their sole biological imperative as a man and woman together. But whittle down to the core – and Laurie does by the end, in the brutal final fights – there is only this: she believes in the future, and he does not.

He only rarely interacts with his counterpart when he travels these days – Marty would find it endlessly amusing, which is why he'll never admit it to him, but he can take only so much of his own company and conversation. Instead, he often lingers at the edges, the panopticon of his own miserable fucking existence.

He stands outside in the sluggish evening air and smokes a couple cigarettes, waiting for the unseen clock to tick down and release him back into the wild. He watches his younger silhouette pacing through the blinds of the house and remembers the Dora Lange case, the sense of expectation that stalked him every second of the waking day back then.

No such expectation guides him these days, but the pain of purpose unrealized lurks in the eyes of everyone he talks to – Terry Guidry, Reverend Theriot. Even young Kelly Reider. The pain is amorphous, diffuse – like maybe it's all the same pain, moving freely through the world. He thinks sometimes he can feel it moving for him.

Across the yard, the light in the living room switches off, consigning the house to the night and him to the dark. He hadn't noticed the streetlight was out, had forgotten how it took the city almost seven months to send someone out to fix back in '95.

His cigarette burns itself out while he is looking up. The only light is in the sky, but something is wrong with the stars.

Someone is standing by his side in the shadows. He can hear them breathing, feel the stinking heat coming off their skin. They want him to turn his head and look but he won't do it.

When Rust blinks, the inside of his eyelids burn yellow, and he tastes decay on his tongue.

* * *

Maybe Marty's problem was thinking it'd be easier, having girls. He always figured they'd be like Maggie, who was born straight-backed and levelheaded, who knew how to look after herself since long before Marty ever snaked a hand around her waist.

His father had tossed him a hand now and then, but Marty doubts he ever felt like this, like he was the one in the house who fucked up.

The moment is both too large for the room and too small for life. He stands listening to Maggie whisper through Audrey's door and feels like a stranger in his own home, his body. In the days after, he doesn't feel like he's quite touching anyone anymore, like maybe he's lost the ability, squandered it on clumsy violence.

Days at the station move so slow he is sure he is standing still. Rust flows on, like he always does, and if he grows a little more quiet, and little more distant – well, Marty barely notices. A few guys have a word with him, the standard _watch your partner_ type talk he hasn't gotten in years, and he does notice that.

At some point Rust and Laurie break things off. Marty doesn't even hear it from the man himself – of course not, since when does Rust share anything with him? Marty has to get it from Maggie's hospital grapevine, secondhand gossip about someone sitting two feet away from him in the car.

Rust bungles a confession in the box and the scumbag kills himself a couple days later. Rust gets agitated about it, even starts talking about the old case from '95 again – like clockwork, Marty thinks wearily. His personal life goes to hell, and the man thinks he's gonna save himself with a case. The case.

He means to have a word with him about it, but they get a couple calls, catch another case, and somehow the breakup with Laurie slips by, another footnote in the man's solitary journey through life.

* * *

Beth is not Marty's usual type, except in the way maybe every younger woman with hero worship in her eyes is a man's type. But it feels cheap to whittle it down to just that – it's not like he's been on the prowl for younger women, setting out with an aim to cheat on Maggie.

 _You think your betrayal is lessened because it was unplanned?_ the Maggie living in his head asks. Marty ignores her, because it's not like that. Really.

Beth is an open palm reaching out of the past to offer understanding and reassurance and not the usual middle finger he's come to expect from such callbacks. Beth believes in a forgiving universe. Beth believes people can change.

“You're a good man,” she tells him, faith shining in her eyes.

It's not just she doesn't call him on his shit – she doesn't even _see_ it.

Seven years ago, Rust said to him, _that a down payment?_ The sting lingered, the way everything Rust says to him can stick its barbs in and hold on – because Rust is Rust, and there's always the possibility he knows something.

Now Marty stares at the off-white ceiling of Beth's little-girl apartment and wonders: did he know about this, back then? Has he always known about Marty's failure? When he saw Marty start to flounder and drown, did he pull up a deck chair for the long view?

And somehow everybody in the station can tell, like Marty's walking around with a special lanyard around his neck given to men who are stepping out on their wives. Or maybe he's just that obvious; Marty's never known. It's not like he brags about it.

If Rust overhears the jokes or sees the looks, he doesn't let on. He says nothing to Marty. He's working the latest case, and it's a bad one: dead kids. Young enough to be blameless even in Rust's eyes.

The case is not hard to crack – it never is, when it's the mother doing the killing.

Charmaine Boudreaux is a state-hopping, kid-popping little headcase. Marty almost tries to take the interview, figures this is a waste of Rust's time and maybe – he doesn't know – _maybe_ not something he needs to be dealing with right now? But Rust resists and so they both end up in the box, staring the weepy dark-eyed bitch down.

Marty gets angry and he's not even sure why. He's mad at Salter for tossing this evil mess into their laps. He's mad at the woman for killing her kids. Most of all, he's mad at Rust for throwing himself against the case like he no longer even feels the bruises as they form, for bringing up _his_ kid in the interview, like it's just another tool to use, like nothing is fucking sacred.

Rust takes Charmaine's hand and leans in to meet her eyes, and she stares back like a venomous snake charmed into briefly retracting her fangs. Rust sends Marty out of the room; after, he expects him to write up the pages of her poison and thank him for the privilege.

“The fuck's with your attitude?” Marty demands in the stairwell outside the office. “What, like my time's less than yours?”

Rust looks around like he's genuinely surprised at Marty pushing back on this. He tips his head, considering him with a stranger's gaze both flat and flattening. “What, you got things to do, Marty? Need to go home to the family, maybe play with the kids?”

The thought flickers over the surface of his mind, a sickening shadow: does he know about Marty and Beth? Rust never approaches these things head-on, has always acted like sex and Marty were the bleach and vinegar of conversational topics. But Marty never assumes he doesn't still look and judge.

“Don't get up my ass just because you ain't getting any,” he says. “You should've held on to your woman.”

Rust calls him a moron and Marty responds by stepping in close – always a gamble, getting up into each other's business. Sometimes one of them will talk sense to the other, but just as often it'll set the violence to a simmer.

It's not that Rust's never called him a moron before, exactly, but he's never said it this way – like he really means it. Like Marty is just one of the other detectives in the bullpen.

“What's going on with you, man?” he asks quietly.

For a second, talking sense still feels possible.

He watches from mission control and gives the order to keep calm, play it open. He can reach Rust when he gets bad. But something about this new hostility is eating away at Marty. His outrage is pushing back; his pride is radioing mission control and telling it to get fucked. This man held the hand of a child murdering evil bitch and then turned on him, like they're all part of the same cesspool of humanity. And maybe Marty's sick of it, being treated like he's one of the bad guys. He doesn't deserve this shit.

Marty says, “You know Salter's asked about you. Iberia called – you been going around bothering people, trying to open up old cases?” Nothing gets under Rust's skin quicker than a reminder he's not trusted by their so-called superiors.

“I'm _working_ ,” Rust snaps, as if that ain't painfully clear. When Rust's personal life goes to shit; he works. When he's not sleeping; he works. He works, and he snaps at the slightest suggestion he should do anything else. Here it is, Marty's old friend: Rust's existential panic. “I have things to do, Marty.”

“Things to do, right. I think you're just trying to keep your mind off that empty house you got waiting for you at the end of the night.”

Mission control watches Rust close down completely.

“Type the report, man,” Rust says. “That's how we do. I get people to talk, you write the stats. It's worked out well for you so far.”

He shoves him, hard and fast. Somehow Marty's the one off balance afterwards, which is typical.

“You know, I'm the only one ever took up for you. Ever.” He searches Rust's eyes but it's impossible to tell if anything lands; it's all a dark reflective pool. “You know what it's like being your partner? You think I enjoy going through life, shackled to you? _Fuck_ you.”

“No, buddy,” Rust says. He's gone pale, but he's using his box voice, smooth and compelling, like he wants Marty to agree with him: “Without me there is no you. And you know it, too – why else did you spend all those years acting so needy?”

Marty doesn't think he can breathe. “I never asked you to show up at my door.”

How long did he carry a secret pride over his mysterious friend when he was a kid? How many times has he received the pats on the back for putting up with Rust, like Marty's the firm hand with a half-feral dog on a leash? How often has he held it close to the chest, this belief he's more than a half-decent cop and married man of two. Unstoppably middle-aged.

“No, but you were always trying to hold me there.”

Marty's never liked letting people go. His partner has a meat-grinder look in his eye, and now Marty's daring him to go ahead, try to take a piece.

Marty says, mouth dry, “Guess you finally wore me down.”

“Type the fucking report,” Rust says and walks out. Marty watches him until he's disappeared down the staircase, and then he marches back to his desk and types the report.

Maybe he has been around the other man too long, because he's starting to think like he does – he's starting to believe than none of this has ever meant a goddamn thing.

* * *

 _You want to see how we do_ , he thinks the next day, after Salter's hauled both their asses into his office. _You want to see how well this works for you, when you don't got me?_

It's fucking pitiful, how quickly it all falls apart on Rust. Marty is almost embarrassed for him.

He starts in on his speculations, rushing forward with his usual tangle of sneering conjecture and gutpunch observations that aren't helped any by their pinpoint accuracy. Maybe crime in the bayou doesn't get the attention it should, but sometimes people just don't want to _hear_ it, not framed in such a way that makes it sound like their fault anyhow. But this never stopped Rust before and it certainly doesn't that day in Salter's office.

Rust barely pauses for breath, and his agitation is clear in the way he sits crumpled down in his chair, like someone's been taking a chisel and hammer to his spine. Marty had declined to sit beside him and he finds the new vantage point disconcerting – or he would, if he wasn't still pissed at the man.

He doesn't look like he's been sleeping, Marty thinks.

Rust builds endless miles of boardwalk out into the dark bayou of his mind and never did give a damn about surveying for stability or safety beforehand. It was always on Marty to follow, test the boards and shore them up where needed. It was on him to make sure Rust could find his way back.

Dumb son of a bitch probably doesn't even realize how mentally disturbed he appears to a man like Salter, a straight arrow who waded through Vietnam watching his own back as guys to the left and right drugged themselves to the gills. Every disdainful twitch Rust makes might as well be the shakes, and his rattled-off coil of speech holds no more merit than the ravings of the homeless lunatic down the street.

Marty recognizes by the familiar patter of Rust's voice that his soliloquy has come to a natural break point (the audience never has known whether to applaud or run him off the stage).

Here is Marty's moment. Here is where he steps in and smooths things out. It's not an impossible task, giving Rust's words a glint of respectability, enough to keep Salter at bay. Marty does it all the time – has always done it. Salter even pauses to look at him, like a judge allowing the defense time for a rebuttal.

Marty says, “I caught zero logic in all that. And that last bit?” He turns to meet Rust's eyes and settles back against his seat, like he's never been more at ease in his goddamn life. “Pure gibberish.”

That's all it takes to set Salter off.

Rust doesn't even have the goddamn decency to look betrayed. He doesn't look like he gets it at all. The man can sift through hundreds of DBs and connect cold cases the length of the Louisiana coastline, but he's so exhausted, so broken, he can't feel the weight being pulled along his side even after it's been dropped.

* * *

Despite Rust's ravings, they have no current case. And yet the days blur and slip together.

Marty's low on sleep and highly distracted, thinking sourly how his body used to treat a night spent fucking like it was sweet nectar from Heaven, not a workout he'll be feeling for the next week. He's barely listening at first when Salter starts in on Rust again; same old, must be a day ending in _y_.

But then he's being addressed directly – yelled at, even. _You know about this?_

Does he know about this?

Marty falls back on instinct. He turns to Rust and asks with simple curiosity, like they haven't been not-speaking all week, “Why'd you talk to Tuttle?”

This is not what Salter wants to hear. In the ensuing argument, during which Marty finally starts to wake up properly and mentally clamber forward, Rust is actually suspended. “One month without pay. Repeated rank insubordination, misallocation departmental resources.”

Salter tops it all off with 30 hours of mandatory counseling, and any other time, any other situation, Marty would find it funny as hell. It's not anything he hasn't told Rust before; man needs therapy, like _goddamn_. But in this context – the undermining of Rust's casework and his fitness for duty – it makes Marty feel a little sick.

He should have seen this coming. He's too shocked not to protest, but he gets the brush-off; he's demonstrated he no longer holds the leash. Now no one has any use for him.

 

2002 (2002) 2002 (2002) 2002

Let him go, now. Let him disappear and never return to this moment, his twist and fall: the bald slap of his flesh upon hers, the bleached splay of her hand against the counter and the ragged scouring their breath gives the air.

No sound escapes this well they have thrown themselves into, and no light will ever reach down into its depths. At its base is sucking mire but no water; nothing will ever grow where they have stood.

The taste of her, recognition only returning after he comes but before he withdraws: determination, anger, and shame. The putrid syrupy infusion of it coats his mouth, makes him choke on his words before he even realizes _why_.

She'd worn a pretty dress to see the job done. For his benefit or hers, hard to say. Harder – because he can't stop analyzing, not even now, not to spare his worthless heart – harder to say it was for him, who after seven years must have been a startlingly easy conquest, stolen in the dark by one Hart from another. No, the dress was for her. By putting it on she could tell herself it was premeditated, and that was supposed to make it bearable.

Was it bearable for her? It seems impossible. He's shaking, pacing, casting about for something to put this sick energy on but there is nothing so he takes it all within himself.

After she leaves, he waits up all night for Marty, sweating in the close heat of his house that still smells of them, more him and than her because she'd barely been –

He waits up all night, but Marty never shows.

He doesn't think she would have waited to report; with the mission accomplished, she wouldn't waste any time. But still, Marty does not come.

Shadows lie static on his walls, but thicken as the hours pass, their emptiness reaching out fuzzy vectors, his stiff body the terminal fixed point. A deadly sort of calm descends. Perfect stillness he could bottle but sell to no one, not even the most desperate of junkies.

Marty does not come. The sun rises, and with it the slow blinking swell of realization: that's not how it works. It has never been that way between them.

So Rust goes to him, one last time.


	4. Tethers

He's treated the interview a bit like a philosophy lecture – gave up playacting a person ten minutes in and aimed for irritating them into showing him what they got on the Lake Charles case. Like so many others before, the detectives don't seem to care for his sociable manners.

“We think you know more than you been saying,” Papania says. He lacks the patience of his older partner. “You've always known more. And maybe it's true, you don't have any control over your condition. But that don't mean you can't use it.”

“Use it,” he echoes. “Well now, detectives, I guess I've lost the thread here. This is a consultation, ain't it?” He is daring them to say no. To be honest.

Gilbough forestalls a biting reply from Papania with a look. “Yeah, but we want to understand your perspective. You take me through what you knew and when, and I'll let you see what we got.”

How does one explain eternity? Where there is no time, nothing can grow, and he has fewer tethers anchoring him in time than most. So – what could he really become? How could he change anything?

He tells them, “Maybe death created time to grow the things that it would kill.” He stares at his ring of beer can people, not giving any sign he notices Gilbough's alert head tilt, Papania straightening in his seat. “And you are reborn but into the same life you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives?”

“How come you couldn't crack the case earlier back in '95? If you'd had these conversations before, I mean,” says Papania, narrow-eyed.

When you can't remember your life, you can't change your life. “Ain't no shortcuts in good police work.”

Papania doesn't like this. “Maybe you stop dancing with us,” he says. “Tell us what you really been up to, how you spend your time.”

A long pause.

It dawns on him he's made a mistake, unbelievable in hindsight; he has overestimated the competency of the Louisiana State Police. Faced with a fresh body and an old pattern, they instinctively avoid the possibility of a local conspiracy of the rich and powerful. It is easier, as ever, to suspect the stranger.

A woman, strung up like Christ with a crown of horns and they don't wonder how or why it's kept out of the papers? They don't check old unsolveds?

No, he can't account for his time back in '95, can't explain his suspicions in '02, his motivations for coming back to Louisiana in 2010. To explain is to have faith one's words will be heard. And he's no preacher looking to convert others.

“You just kept pulling the right old murders, take the case wherever you wanted it to go.”

“You're a a juicer – ever black out?”

“Ever wake up, don't remember what happened?”

They're lifting off the brakes now. Misreading the box. God, what pitiful shit. He has plenty of anger and shame to exploit but they ain't hitting it, and even if they did, it wouldn't lead to where they want it to go.

He can still see Marty standing over Ledoux's body, unaware of the tear tracks mingling with perspiration on his cheeks, his rage morphing into panic. The image distorts and he is watching himself waiting at a crime scene of his own making, police cruiser lights flashing through the window of the meth house and highlighting the tiny too-still body of an infant girl. It's a nightmare, but not one he can wake up from, not yet.

As he leaves, he thanks them for the beer – the only worthwhile thing they've given him.

* * *

Marty has been suspicious from the start, but he isn't positive something is up until they let him start reminiscing about Maggie and the girls and the life-he-coulda-had.

He's treated the interview a bit like a therapy session – you know, really let it all out. That amount of raw regret and pontificating should've made them dismissive or uncomfortable or _something_ , but all he got was polite sympathy. The kind you turn on a witness you're hoping it's going to lead to a break in the case.

If this was an ordinary consultation, they'd have tried to steer him clear of all the personal stuff. He spent too many years as Rust Cohle's partner to not have learned how useful the personal can be, if you're in the box; if you're trying to jam somebody up.

He pushes back a little, and they spill an equal, careful amount – they tell him Rust has been back in Louisiana, which he carefully doesn't react to – the man could've been in Texas or Mars or down the street and Marty wouldn't have known the difference. And they say he's become some kind of a part-time bartending drunk, which he can't help but reject forcibly. It's not that he can't see Rust becoming a drunk; he can't see him being sociable enough to bartend.

“You're wrong,” he says, shaking his head. “Nobody could change that much. You are dead wrong.”

They take his reaction as an opening. They think they've got a spot to place the wedge, which is so misguided, it'd be funny if it wasn't offensive. He's had Rust in and out of his life for decades – to suggest he wouldn't have picked up on his alleged psychopathy labeled him as either criminally inept or a possible accessory – _groomed_ perhaps.

He'll give them this much: they clearly haven't thought through the implications of their little theory. To imply it deliberately would be a little dumb. They don't seem like dumb detectives.

He stares down at their folder of circumstantial bullshit as Papania finishes their pitch: “Marty, he never went anywhere. He never left. He's been right here doing bad things a long time.”

They are so surprised when he stands and starts gathering his shit, it's almost funny. Or would be, if he wasn't so angry. They exchange a quick look over the table.

“Hey, hey, hold up now – ”

Marty wonders what they got from Rust when they talked to him. He almost wishes he'd been there to watch. “Whatever Rust is or was or – or _became_ ,” he says flatly, “don't call me again. I won't help you.”

“We're trying to help him, Marty,” Gilbough says, and it's a final parting shot to his pride, because: seriously? Do these young guns think they invented that line?

It's a nice day turned gorgeous afternoon outside the station. Marty wishes he was in the mood to enjoy it.

 

** Part IV **

 

(2003) 1994

The perfectly steady hands of someone who is still waiting for the shakes to come back. The remote gaze, a collapsing telescope he tries to put away as he looks at Marty and focuses. Fresh from Lubbock and gaunt with it, with the food there and the horrors of a mind like his forced back into a sober frame. If you know what to look for, he seems fragile. But his hands are steady.

He must be around thirty or so. Marty remembers when he thought that was an age of maturity, finally a solid foothold in real adult life.

“They're sending me to Louisiana,” Rust says.

Marty doesn't understand the look in his eyes at first, because he's not used to Rust looking at him like he's his one solid thing. He hasn't seen the man in half a year, so he's not really used to him _looking_ at all.

Marty knows it's not this man's fault, not yet, but knowing's not the same as believing.

He doesn't want to see him. Not his bony wrists or his too-pale forearms, or the way he sits like he still has stitches in three places pulling at the wrong posture. The Marty who packed those gunshot wounds is the one this Rust wants. Well, let him go find him.

“That's where we meet,” Rust says. It's not quite a question and it's not like he needs to remind Marty.

The words are almost an affirmation, like the ones the Promise Keepers used to repeat together in group session. Or a crowded church murmuring amen. People, always willing things to be true out of some hope it'll fix them. Marty's done plenty of it himself, but he never thought he'd see Rust try to play the game.

“What's with the patch?” Marty asks at last, breaking a promise and speaking.

Rust glances down at the nicotine square on the inside of his forearm. It's supposed to be roughly flesh-colored, but Rust's been in the hospital long enough to look practically blue next to the tan latex.

He says to Marty, “I'm getting clean. Completely clean. Told myself I was done with all of it after they pulled me out.”

Marty nods slowly, considering. He says, “You never told me you tried quitting.”

“No,” Rust says after a long pause. “I guess I wouldn't.”

Marty's always been clumsy with manipulation. Maggie used to say it was the intent of the attempt that hurt. A blow to her heart and her pride – that he would try; that he thought she wouldn't see through it.

Rust's eyes are narrow and flinching. He's maybe confused, a little lost. But Marty's confident he won't ask for directions, never from him.

“Well, you've always been a private person,” Marty says.

Rust's attention is leaving again, turning inward. He is no longer looking at Marty like he means something.

* * *

He turns the age his mother was when she died. The calendar flips a little, and he is older than she ever got to be. No special wisdom descends; he didn't expect it to, really. Foregone conclusions. He already knew she was a better person than him – at the very least a better parent, anyway.

A couple more years go by and he is as old as his father was when he became a widower. For his birthday, Marty sits out on his front step with a beer to watch the early summer lightning bugs get on with it.

He tries to remember if his father ever minded being alone.

The images don't form up, but Marty figures he must not have minded it enough – he never remarried, or even dated again. He remembers overhearing a great-aunt prodding him about it some Christmas during college. Remembers, too, his dad snapping back, _I'm too old to be dating_. Like he'd had his set allotment of love and thought it unseemly to go crying for more.

Sometimes when Marty's spent more than fifteen minutes overthinking the movies he's listed on his dating profile, he thinks about that.

He wonders if the loneliness ever ate at his dad when he was lying in bed. Marty wakes up on sunny mornings, rolls over in his white sheets, and wonders how the room still feels cold when it is so bright. Surely the person in bed under his arm is just in the other room; surely he can still hear the giggles of little girls urging him to get up and join them.

Tonight Marty's bought a pack of Camels just to see the smoke curl out of the corner of his eye. He tries smoking one and hates it, so he lets it burn down balanced on the lip of an empty beer can until the bridge of its ash collapses and the filter falls in.

He doesn't think about why he bought the cigarettes, but he thinks about Rust, who never seemed happy about his condition. Marty thinks if it was him, if he could see his girls again, his girls when they loved him – smiling, laughing, running across a room to throw themselves full-body around his knees – if he could glimpse any of it again, it would be worth any amount of the bad shit.

But maybe for the rest of them life is supposed to have only moments, its stages and phases where certain things happen. People who are supposed to happen to you. And once it's over, it's over.

His perspective is admittedly skewed, a ball of yarn in place of a straight line of thread. Even thinking of it that way is Rust's fault; the man took his thoughts and feelings and life and crumpled it all up, and now Marty's stuck spending his twilight years trying to smooth it back out.

Shit can happen more than once. It can keep happening. Your partner can leave you a thousand different times in a thousand different ways; he can leave again one final time. But his younger self could always drop by at any time, and Marty's awareness stops the wound from ever closing.

He sits and watches the slow pinpricks of light drift across the darkening ditch brush of the roadside. He finishes his beer, but doesn't grab another because it feels a little pointless. He lights another Camel and sets it on the stoop next to him.

Once it's over, it's over.

So is it over?

 

2005 (1998)

He turns the age his mother was when she left him.

Everything about her belongs to a diegetic past he plays no active role in: a narrative of his father's making, filtered through time and mental illness. She'd been The Older Woman, contentedly unfettered by marriage or a settled life. She presumably thought she was clear of child rearing long before the surprise of his existence, the dismaying register of his heartbeat within. He wonders why she didn't get rid of him earlier, that she waited to _see_ him, know him, before making the decision. She must've been curious; maybe she was just desperate.

Rust can't travel outside his own lifetime, and when he was younger the time before he existed seemed wild and alive, full of mystery. Now he knows it must have been more of the same: people fuck, fight, and die.

And every once in a while, an almighty storm comes through to wash it all away.

He shouldn't have gone looking for coverage of Katrina. The bayou is a watery maw lined with salt-poisoned groves. People disappear all the time. He knows this, so why does he go looking?

The story is inescapable, even in Alaska. Every screen in every bar and shop, every cover of every newspaper. Everybody watching with delicate hand-over-mouth horror, as if the situation was completely unforeseen, as if people hadn't been ringing the bell over the levees for ages.

As if the authorities haven't been leaving the poor to die from worse for years.

He doesn't own a computer, so he sits at the library and keeps clicking through. Journalists for _The Times-Picayune_ have hunkered down with laptops and sleeping bags and are putting out online-only editions on the chaos and desperation filling New Orleans. _The Daily Advertiser_ reports Baton Rouge and Lafayette have thus far avoided the worst of the flooding and are starting to take in people from the coast. Rust has trouble accepting the optics – thousands housed in the stadium where Marty used to cheer on his alma mater and guzzle beer like he was still twenty.

He's sitting outside his trailer later that evening, sketchbook and pen lying heavy in his lap. His thoughts won't leave, and he refuses to write them down, give any form to the anger and yearning mingling uselessly inside him. There is nothing before him he cares to draw.

He shouldn't have gone looking for coverage of the hurricane, because it breaks him out of his routine, rubs a wet cloth over the grime obscuring his view. It make him think of Louisiana and the Harts. It makes him angry.

It makes him travel.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rust says, and presses his mouth tight. Hot air washes over him, luxuriant and permissive like an Indian summer, and he has to close his eyes. For a moment he's back even further, a child who was always cold spirited away to a land of warmth and light.

“Hello to you too,” Marty says drily.

He is devastatingly familiar. Deceptively easy and simple, sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of the lawnmower. His hair is bright and ruffled by the wind. Oil stains decorate his wrists like bracelets; he has been rubbing his hands together in his frustration. His knees are crooked up awkwardly near his elbows; he's going to be stiff and unmovable as an old man – a prophecy Rust will be forced to leave unverified.

Rust is tired. He feels ground down and over-extracted, a fourth pour over the last miserable dregs of paid-out coffee. He should walk away.

He sits next to Marty.

“Problem with it?” he asks around a cigarette, nodding to the mower.

“Nothing but sputters when I pull. Crank shaft won't turn.”

There's probably something amusing about this, him sitting with Marty in front of the machine that has historically been an object of strange tension. If Rust believed in cosmic intentions, he might raise his eyebrows here.

Without really thinking about it, he finds his sketchbook open to a clean page. He squints in the sunlight at Marty, who glances at the pen in his hand, grins, and says:

“Draw me like one of your French girls.” He's got that look on his face which usually means he's attempting to make a joke. The grin flips when he realizes it's not landing, and that's pretty familiar too. “Seriously? I mean, I know you you were a hard 'no' when Maggie tried to set up that movie date, but shouldn't some basic knowledge filter in? Through, I don't know, osmosis or something?”

“Jesus, Marty, shut up.” The cigarette bobs with the words. He's out of practice talking and smoking at the same time.

He nearly bites his tongue for saying his name aloud, but Marty doesn't seem to notice. He shrugs and goes back to squinting at the lawnmower.

The pen hovers. Rust thinks about the deceiving permanence of ink and the hubris that drives one to try capturing life on a page.

 

2006

Marty quits the job and doesn't regret it. He hands over his gun and badge and feels lighter around the middle, which has been a problem area for a few years now according to the mirror.

He has no wife, no partner, and no job. On paper he has never been more free. He belongs nowhere and to no one, not if he doesn't choose it. Choosing has always been the hard part.

Maggie used to accuse him of playing dumb. Rust was less determined to be gracious and called him a moron. With neither of them around to annotate his choices or demand explanations, he lets himself off the hook and the days glide by easy and kind of dull, like a long car drive. But Marty always liked driving, so that's just fine.

He moves into a new place, one suited to his modest budget. He spends a few weeks dithering over furniture, long enough that the open spaces and white walls start to spook him a little. If it wasn't for his big TV dominating the one wall, the space could belong to Rust – just add a few overflowing ashtrays, some creepy drawings, and a lawn chair.

So he buys a sofa: plump, brown, and kind of ugly but unashamedly comfortable. It is something neither Maggie nor Rust would ever have bought – Maggie's reasons being aesthetic; Rust's ascetic. As he shoves it into place against the wall and steps back to admire its full-figured glory, Marty feels like he's warded them both off somehow.

Years pass and he never sees a visitor, so he has to assume the sofa works better than he ever could have hoped.

 

2007

Maggie tries to broach the subject with him, once. They are sitting together at Maisie's high school graduation, putting on the friendly faces so as to not tarnish the memory.

Marty is shifting on the hard bleacher seats of the gymnasium, wondering when the school decided to start going all-in on the speeches from honored community members. Audrey's graduation had been at least half an hour shorter than this, he thinks.

“I bumped into Kathleen the other day,” Maggie says in an undertone. When he glances over, she has her mask of polite attentiveness in place. She was always better at faking interest; years of empathizing with chatterbox patients, probably. “She told me you left the job.”

“Oh,” is all he says at first. Did she want to know why he didn't quit earlier, to save their marriage? Or was he supposed to disclose the change of income on some alimony paperwork?

He doesn't know what his face is doing, but Maggie says, “Relax, Marty. I was just curious – after all this time, why quit now?”

He stares hard down at the floor of the gymnasium, at the neat rows of blue gowns. It takes a second to relocate Maisie, but once he's found her, he keeps his eyes there.

He says, “Hit my twenty, you know, qualified for some benefits. Felt like it was time for a change.”

She sees through that immediately. “If you'd done a few more years, you could've retired with a full pension.”

Other people have asked about this, and Marty never knows what to say. He never did like feeling obligated, especially on account of money. Especially when it meant looking at babies in microwaves.

“It was time for a change,” he says again, voice steady. The air in the gym is stifling: too many restless bodies stuffed in suits, it's starting to get at him.

Maggie lets the topic drop. When he glances over, though, she has a thin thinking line between her eyebrows.

They listen to the rest of the speech by Mr. My Daddy Used to Employ All Your Daddies And Don't You Forget It. They clap dutifully. Marty fumbles for his program.

“There are two more,” Maggie says, staying his hands.

He stifles a groan. “Hope Maisie remembered to go to the bathroom before all this. Sure as hell wish I did.”

“All those days driving around on the job, surely you learned to hold it.”

“Uh, not to rub it in or overshare,” he says, “but we always just pulled over and went by the side of the road.”

His half-formed grin fades as he realizes he said _we_. Maggie looks as regretful as he feels about it, which is not as much a consolation as he would've thought.

The new speech seems to be about a boy struggling to bicycle up a steep hill, or something. Five minutes and Marty's already lost the plot.

He should've remembered Maggie's favorite form of distraction was other people's problems. “Have you heard from him – or has he, you know – ”

“Nope to both. Not a word. No visits.”

“I'm sorry to hear to hear that,” she says quietly. He doesn't bother hiding what he thinks of that, and she bites her lip, a little frustrated. “I mean it.”

“Maybe you mean it now, but you sure as hell knew what you were doing back then.”

“That's right, I did. _I_ did.” She crinkles her program up in her fists and then blinks down at it in dismay. She says without looking up, “If I'm sorry for anything, it's what happened between you two. It wasn't his fault, I made it happen. Rust had been drinking and – ”

“You doing this _now_ , are you kidding me?” Marty says. Now his eyes are on the wrinkled program too, watching her try to smooth out the folds. He hopes she doesn't expect to get his copy. “I don't want to hear his name, 'specially not from you.”

They listen to the rest of the speech in silence. The boy on the bicycle makes it to the top of the hill, and they applaud thunderously to hear it.

 

(2009) 1975

“I don't believe you,” the child says, his darting eyes coming back to rest on Rust, who has to watch the same horror hit him anew every time their eyes meet.

Rust exhales some smoke. “Don't matter. Doesn't change what's gonna happen.”

“No, I mean – it's dangerous. I know it is. You're wrong that it ain't. I seen – I don't know what I seen, but it was bad.”

Rust pauses and out of the swirling morass of his earliest memories of traveling, an image surfaces: a towering jungle, the crumbling brick and stink of death.

“I coulda died,” the boy says flatly. “I know I coulda, there was gunshots and there was – ”

“A man,” Rust finishes, numb. His cigarette drops out from between his fingers. He'd forgotten, how did he ever forget?

The boy steps forward, his expression of revulsion wavering in the grip of something that has always been a stronger pull for them. Curiosity.

“What was that place? What does it mean?”

“It doesn't mean anything,” Rust hears himself say. A lie, he realizes – he is lying. How could he forget about the catacombs in the jungle?

How could he forget Marty?

The boy has tears in his eyes, but he is already old enough to have learned to never let them fall. That control is all he can wield against this world.

“Who are you?” the boy asks him.

It's a good question.

 

2010

He doesn't go to Marty. He won't let himself.

He's not playing the old useless game, trying to buck causality. It's more a balancing of needs: he needs to build a case. He needs proof. And maybe he needs his partner, but not all needs can be fulfilled at once.

Louisiana doesn't welcome him, the old stranger to its wrecked, sun-drenched shore. But it takes him back just the same.

 

2012

Marty's been jittery since he left the station. He downed too much coffee in the interview – such a rookie mistake, abusing a prop. Memory and anger are working overtime to ruin his day, like setting aside time for the consultation hadn't been enough. And now: the red truck in his rearview.

He thinks it can't be real. It drives up on him like it's roaring straight out of the past, like Rust found a way to bring it with him when he traveled. But this isn't a visitor from another time.

Operating on instinct, Marty slows down. He pulls over onto the shoulder of the highway.

And here he is.

He's always known, in the back of his mind, that something serious must have happened to Rust. His older self always looked so rough. Somewhere along the line Marty got used to looking at it; it became another facet of the general fucked-up-ness that was Rustin Cohle.

It's been almost ten years with no visitors. He's not used to it anymore.

“Long time,” Marty says, trying not to stare too obviously.

“Longer for some than others,” Rust says. He is squinting slightly in the afternoon sun, and it doesn't improve his overall impression of worn lines. But he studies Marty with something like a faint smile, as if he's not quite used to looking at him either.

Marty follows him to a roadside bar, a grainy-lit dump with peanut shells on the floor where the light filters through five layers of deep fat fryer dust on the windows.

Rust's posture has eroded. Sometime in the past decade his ass became a connoisseur of bar stools, so Marty can't blame him for that. For _that_.

He's not one for catching up, god forbid – jumps right in on the Lake Charles case. He's so single-minded, it could be '02 or '98 or '95 again, Marty entering a room and finding he's collected a sticker burr on his side, and the burr wants to talk tox screens before Marty's had a single cup of coffee.

It's obvious time hasn't passed for Rust so much as it's hogtied him to its tailgate and hit the gas pedal. The only difference in his manner is how difficult he evidently finds it to meet Marty's eyes unblinking. He does it, because since when does pain stop him, but Marty finds the effort on display almost more uncomfortable than the gaze itself.

“I came back here to Louisiana for the first time in 2010.”

Two years he's been within spitting distance of Marty, and nothing. “And why is that?”

“Same reason I'm sitting across the table from you now. A man remembers his debts.”

The discomfort grows strong enough for Marty to look away, try to wave it off. “I try not to dwell in the past.”

The look Rust gives him is narrow and sardonic, the same one he always used to give whenever the conversation touched upon his condition, however oblique the reference. Like it was Marty's fault he is the way he is.

“Must be nice,” is all he says.

Right. “Look, I'm not interested in whatever it is you think you owe me.”

“Oh, I don't owe you,” says Mr. I Fucked Your Wife. “We left something undone, we got to fix it. I've been working on this for two years. Me, myself. Never called you, I never bothered you with it – ”

“Bothered me?” Marty puts his beer down a little harder than necessary. “Tell me something – all those times I saw you like this, _you knew_. You knew how it went down, with me and Maggie. With Maggie and – ” he cuts off, face twisting. “And you never said shit to me.”

“Man's entitled to live his life like he wants, without interference.” Rust considers him over the chipped tabletop. “If I'd told you – whatever it is you have in your mind that would've made a difference – what good would've it done, really?”

Marty looks at him, incredulous. “If I'd known, I could've – made different decisions, I could've done something – ”

Rust scoffs at him – that short puff of noise he always made because he didn't really _do_ laughter.

Marty hasn't gotten into a fight in a few years. He generally thinks he's settled down, moved past that version of himself who looked for solutions fist-first. But he comes close to hitting Rust. He pauses and takes a breath. That's what you're supposed to do when you're close to murdering a man, right? It resets the system: nerve chemicals or hormones or something. Marty read that in a Yahoo Answers somewhere.

He shakes his head and the words come out bitter. “Shit, man, what'd you do? Alienate every other person in your life, and then finally you came back to me in the rotation?” Like he wasn't the centerpiece of that particular batting order.

Rust doesn't like that. He leans forward, surprisingly swift. “You know, not for nothing, but if you wouldn't've clipped Ledoux back then, we might've got the whole fucking story out of him.”

The scene comes to him easy, like it hasn't been seventeen years: the weak light leaking through the small fan high up in the wall of the trailer. The flies. Two shadows, only one moving after he hauled open the door. He swears he can even smell it: blood, sweat, and semen. His stomach turns, sour acid creeping up his throat.

“You know, I think I'm gonna finish this beer and say: so long.” He takes a long drink, looking to hurry the process up.

But Rust is as persistent as he is merciless. He keeps at him, and somehow it's only then Marty comprehends the man is actually asking to work together again. The fucking sack on him.

“Only way for you to understand what I'm on to here is for me to show you,” he says, like it's 1995 and he's quick-walked across the office first thing in the morning, like he didn't sleep the night before and has been waiting hours for Marty to get in. “You got to come see what I got.”

It's been a long time since anyone expected anything from Marty, and this reminder makes him angry.

“I don't think I've been very clear with you, Rust. If you were drowning? I'd throw you a fucking barbell. Why would I ever help you?”

The look in Rust's eyes is pretty awful. Marty stands, ready to leave it behind along with the rest of the mess – the high-handed attitude; the memories; the pain.

Rust's voice almost cracks open from the force with which he scrapes the bottom of the barrel. “Because you have a debt. This is on you, too, buddy.”

They have never in their lives been buddies. The word is a concealed weapon, the tone a bullet.

But nobody's expected anything from Marty in a long time.

“What d'you got to show me?”

* * *

He almost breaks the little television screen, but the impulse is averted at the last second. It won't change what happened to the little girl. It won't change anything.

He stares at a spot on the wall, where the edge of a yellow work light has bisected one of the papers taped up – loopy handwriting, a woman's. Marty reads _Strange is the night where BLACK STARS rise_ and wonders if the fantasy held even as they started in on her.

His heart is racing like he forgot to take his blood pressure meds. He might repay Rust for all the alcohol he's plied him with by throwing it back up over the concrete floor of his storage unit. He's shaky, but if he goes for the chair he's not sure he'll make it.

“Did you kill Tuttle?” he asks.

He recalls Billy Lee's smile, his expansive gladhanding around the station, and he can't honestly say he hopes Rust didn't do it. They both have at least one extrajudicial kill to their name. Rust shot a man and became indentured to the feds; Marty shot a man and got a promotion. But he's always known the rage in their veins is the same.

Despite the season and all the alcohol, Marty feels cold. He wants to rub his palms up and down his arms, wants the comforting brush of skin on skin.

He wants to live in a world where he hasn't let monsters roam the state for seventeen years.

* * *

Because this is America, the first step to repairing a shattered partnership and correcting the biggest fuck-up of their lives involves a stack of paperwork.

“You prefer to work W-2 or 1099?” he asks Rust. It's two mornings on from the storage unit, and he's feeling almost recovered from the hangover. So far he kind of hates his 50s.

Rust doesn't stop with the boxes he's carrying across the room. He says over his shoulder, “Whatever's easiest for you, Marty. Not planning on worrying about Tax Day next year.”

“Only man doesn't worry about his taxes is either avoiding them or dead,” he calls after him. He looks again at the forms and comes to a decision. “Fuck it, I'm not doing your withholding. Barely understand that shit for myself, won't be responsible for yours too.”

When he looks at Rust again, the man is returning to his truck for more boxes. He looks perfectly indifferent to the pains Marty is taking to make sure this thing is set up right.

Typical ungrateful employee, he thinks and almost grins. He looks at the next item on the new employee to-do list, and the barely born expression turns into a grimace. This should be fun.

“You got any kind of health insurance?”

* * *

They are sorting through the first load from the storage unit when Rust tries talking to him like a human being for maybe the first time in either of their lives.

“What do I do?” Marty repeats blankly. Rust shifts, unsettled, and he relents. “Sorry, I just – don't remember you ever asking me a personal question before.”

“I already knew the basics,” says Rust. And, fair.

“Well, I – ” God, this is so weird, “stay busy. You know: fish, uh, girlfriends.”

Rust looks up. “Yeah? You seeing anybody?”

They stare at each other across the table. There's a lot of shit on the table.

“Not really, a few dates. It's all, you know. Pretty casual.”

Unlike anything to do with Rust, who has never been casual about anything or anyone. It's impossible to talk about this with him and not think of – everything; another life, one existing only on the bridge between memory and dream.

He clears his throat, eyes half on the box in front of him, half on Rust. “Quiet life, I don't stay out late. I just go home.” He figures Rust probably knows about living with the stagnant air where no one but himself has moved through a room. “You?”

Rust turns away and staples a photo to the wall, movement casual and unhurried. “About the same. No girlfriend. Just – work, home.”

Once, they briefly shared such a home. He wonders what the memory looks like from Rust's side.

“How's the traveling treating you?” He catches the look Rust gives him. “What?”

“Nothin' – just,” Rust is slow in lowering the stapler. “I don't remember you ever asking me directly about traveling before.”

Marty accepts the point scored with a nod and maybe a passing grin. He spreads his hands in admission over the boxes. “Thought I knew the basics.”

They are slow in reestablishing lines of communication, but the shared sentiment comes through clear from both sides: _mea culpa, prick._

* * *

Marty pushes the door to his office open with his hip and rotates inside. He has his hands full with three cartons of rice and a stack of meats – beef pho, curry chicken, garlic shrimp, and something else he'd pointed to at random because he couldn't remember what Rust liked. Man's going to eat it anyway, if he has anything to say about it.

He's still a little irritated he hadn't noticed the day passing until he looked at his phone. Neither of them have eaten anything since bagels in the morning. And of course he has to be the one who ends up making the food run, because Rust is all too willing to smoke and drink his way through the hunger pangs.

“You still like your shit spicy?” he asks, walking up to their desks and lowering the grub haul.

Rust pauses with his current stack of old photos and cranes his neck to look over the cartons. “You grab extra packets of hot sauce?”

Marty flips him a couple and breaks apart his chopsticks. They both dig in.

It takes them about ten minutes to realize Rust has traveled. Marty's been squinting at his shirt, brow knitted. He could've sworn Rust was wearing white that morning.

“How'd you not notice?” he asks in disbelief. He thinks about snatching the food away, because his erstwhile employee will be back from wherever he's wandered, and he'll probably still have not eaten. Damn if he's going to feed both of them.

Like he suspects this line of thinking, Rust holds his mixed carton of rice and shrimp closer to his chest. He says, “I wasn't exactly staring at the calendar, Marty.”

“When are you from?”

Rust thinks about this. “The third,” he decides. “Thursday.”

“What – three days? Is that all you manage these days, old man?”

Rust doesn't pause in his chewing. He gives a little shrug. It's a surreal moment.

About half an hour after he's left again for Thursday, Rust comes in through the front doors carrying yet another box of files. He stands over the desks, looking at the assortment of mostly-empty cartons and says, sounding almost impressed, “Goddamn, Marty. Next time you say you're hungry, guess I'd better listen.”

Marty doesn't bother telling him; he'll find out on Thursday.

* * *

 _After all this time_ , Maggie said to him, not quite marveling, _and you two – just like that?_

 _I took some convincing_ , he told her.

He wasn't lying exactly, but once he's been working with Rust for about a week, the situation feels more fundamental than that. He should've said _yeah, just like that._

He has to own his surprise at how easily they fall in with each other.

Sure, they are more tentative than they used to be. It's not the same as awkward – that's a feeling Marty can recognize at fifty paces, because it dominates every conversation he has with his girls. He and Rust know each other too well for that.

Maybe it's age. Maybe it's the worn-out knowledge of the alternative waiting for both of them at home every night.

Or maybe it's as simple as this: they go easier on one another now. Anything that might have once caused friction is buried in the past and for once it all stays there. Even the brief conversation they have about Maggie doesn't spark much in the way of resentment. If you'd asked Marty even six months ago, he wouldn't have guessed it could be like this.

For perhaps the first time in almost forty years, they fit each other. Neither expects anybody but the man currently sitting beside him in the car.

 

(2012) 1985

Rust is bartending and Marty's up on one of the stools, snacking on peanuts. They are arguing about how to handle Sheriff Geraci. More specifically, they are arguing how far past the line of legality they need to go, versus how far they'd like to.

Mr. Doumain doesn't say much, except to vote for torture. Marty doesn't think he's joking, and, looking at Rust's thoughtful expression, he is starting to feel a little concerned about the end vote tally.

“Torture leaves evidence,” he points out. He figures aiming for strategic reasoning is best, because Rust never has found Marty a convincing arbiter of ethics. “And neither of us have a badge to cover us anymore.”

“It's an ineffective interrogation tactic anyway,” Rust says, sounding not- _not_ disappointed. “Geraci'd just bleat out nonsense to make the hurtin' stop.”

He stops wiping the glass in his hand and looks past Marty, who turns arounds to see what's making his face shut down.

Rust stands in the center of the room, baby-faced and rumple-haired.

Marty stares at him. He turns and stares at his Rust. This has never happened before. Even Doumain has set his head back to watch with mild curiosity.

The two Rusts square off like gunslingers, each watching the other with a close-mouthed wariness.

“Want a drink?” the barman asks.

The kid says, “Sure,” and takes the stool beside Marty after giving the room a quick once-over.

Marty notices the lingering direction of his glance and says, “Yeah, I lost some of my hair. Don't get too smug – you can see what a bang-up job you did with yours.”

He receives a flinty glance from his bartender, but he doesn't care. This is too funny.

“What were y'all talking about?” Rust asks after he's drank some of his whiskey. His accent's so unripe, it's still got the fruit sticker on it.

“Torture,” Marty's Rust says flatly.

“Oh,” the kid says. And then: “Torture's not really an effective interrogation tactic.”

He sounds dangerously close to earnest. Marty can't take much more of this, his spleen's going to pop from the pressure.

Rust looks at his younger self narrowly. “See, what I was thinking is, we get some jumper cables. Tie him to a chair.”

Marty props his chin up by his hand. “Oh, is _that_ what you were thinking?”

He gets ignored. But Rust looks between them, clocking he's missing something.

Marty reaches for some more peanuts and cracks them open with one hand; the kid tracks his movements from the corner of his eyes, like the shattered pieces of shell sitting in his palm are the most important details of this entire visit. Rust behind the bar doesn't find this entertaining either.

“I've got a sniper rifle,” Doumain announces. They all look over. “And I'm a good shot.”

Not worrying at all, Marty thinks as he slowly munches on his peanuts.

“So we get him isolated,” says Rust, just as the younger says, “Get him on your turf.”

Their gazes collide over the bar counter.

“Make sure he realizes he's alone,” the kid continues. They're communicating something, just the two of them: recalling some private knowledge. “He can't just be scared – he has to believe there's no way out.”

“Belief's the important part. I can play the wild man with nothing to lose,” says Rust, which Marty doesn't find as funny because Rust _is_ a wild man with nothing to lose.

He swipes the peanut shells off the bar. “Why don't we take him fishing?”

At his side, young Rust's eyebrows jump a little. “We go fishing?” Hard to say whether he sounds more confused or pleased at the prospect.

Rust's mouth thins and he says to Marty, “Get a big boat, something with a deck. I can hide in the cabin.”

“S'long as you call me captain,” he says.

Rust snatches the mostly empty whiskey glass from his younger self and tells him firmly, “We will never call him that.”

Young Rust looks between them again, and Marty swears he almost smiles.

* * *

Rust shows Miss Dolores his ledger and everything in the room changes, takes on a charge. Marty knows before she even says anything, he's not going to like it.

“You know Carcosa?” she says, turning to Rust. Marty can almost feel the heat of mania bloom into a brain fever as she thinks she's in the presence of another believer. Her demeanor completely reverses, brightening and opening.

Rust has caught the scent. He leans forward. “What is it?”

“Him who eats time,” she breathes.

Marty feels the blood drain from his face.

He's not watching the old lady anymore – he can't look anywhere but at Rust, who's got a terrible light in his eyes Marty doesn't like. It's more than recognition – it's revelation.

Back in the car, they're both quiet. Marty's wishing he'd never looked the old bat up – what actionable intel did they really get, anyway? Another confirmation of the man with scars. Ties to the Childresses. Nothing they didn't really already know. Her words keep banging around his head like a staggering mean drunk.

“You don't think,” he begins, and stops again, because it feels almost like blasphemy to continue. But if he learned one thing from his repeated fuck-ups with Maggie, it's once he's thought something, the deed's as good as done already. So fuck it.

“What that woman said, about the, the guy. Our green-eared spaghetti monster.”

“Him who eats time,” quotes Rust. He lights a cigarettes and gives him an odd considering look, like he's halfway to amused but not sure if it's worth the effort. “Got you spooked, kid?”

Marty grips the steering wheel and sends his eyes briefly up to the heavens, or at least what he can see of them through the windshield. This is what he gets for his concern.

“You remember I'm older than you, right? By like five years.” Fuck it. _Fuck_ it. “And, yeah, Rust. Somehow a crazy old woman going on about someone who eats time _–_ whatever the fuck that means – while I'm investigating a kid-raping serial killer with my _time-spastic_ partner – yeah, maybe it's got me a little spooked. I'm allowed. I'm allowed to be fucking spooked.”

“Never said you wasn't,” says Rust calmly. His mouth slides up, almost conspiratorial in his amusement. He shifts in his seat. “Shit, when you lay the facts out like that, guess I'm kind of unsettled myself.”

Feeling a little mollified, Marty turns up the radio. Hard for creepy vibes to stick around with Country's Top 40 taking up all the air in the car.

But the heavy mood lingers into the evening and they both seem to feel it. Puttering around the office morphs into splitting a bottle of whiskey. They sit across a desk from each other, unconsciously re-staging the old bullpen.

Maybe that's why, when Rust asks again why he quit the job, Marty tells him the truth.

“Well, I saw something, a baby. Tweaker tried to dry the kid in a microwave.” He takes a drink, blinking the image away. He doesn't look at Rust, doesn't need to see how he feels about that, because he already knows. “Saw that, what he'd done, and I thought – never again. I never want to look at anything like that anymore.”

It took chiseling his life down to only the job for him to finally realize you're as responsible for what you surround yourself with as you are for what you do. He had no affair, or family, or even a partner to blame. Every day was a choice; he doesn't know if he chose the coward's way out by quitting, but he hasn't regretted doing it even once.

He flicks his eyes up to Rust, who is watching him. “What about you? Why'd you come back?”

He knows what he wants to hear. Same thing he's always wanted to hear from Rust – an admission of need. For him to look at Marty in all his over-the-hill glory and say something like _I came back for you._

Marty rubs a hand down his face. Fuck, he can't believe he's circled back to this. If someone wrote a country love ballad about him, it'd be eight minutes of sad twanging guitar and a man mumbling into his beer.

“This,” is what Rust says, of course. He shifts in his seat like he's getting ready to take his leave. “Had to see to this, before getting on with something else.”

“You seen yourself at all?” Marty asks abruptly, before Rust can get up. “I mean, like – after all this?” And then he says, “Shit, don't answer that. I don't want to know.”

It's a question that has lurked in wait for him when he tries to sleep lately. He doesn't think he's ever seen Rust looking older than the one he has in front of him now. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. He didn't see Rust for years before he came driving up on him outside the state PD.

But Rust is already slowly shaking his head. He doesn't even look torn up about it.

“My life's been a circle of violence and degradation long as I can remember. I'm ready to tie it off.” He does stand up then, and walks past Marty sitting frozen in his chair. “See you on the boat, Marty.”

* * *

Rust never was particularly fond of any of the other detectives back at the station, but he _hated_ Geraci. On the bad days, the bullpen felt like the front line in a war between Rust and the forces of complacency, outright violence threatening from either side and Marty the sole patrol stuck in the middle.

It's kinda nice, Marty thinks: not being in the middle anymore.

“ _Marty_ – ” Steve tries as he takes his gun away.

“Don't look at me, I ain't never been able to control him.”

The rest of the interrogation is less fun. Steve's a liar and kind of slow on the uptake, but he's no monster, no child molester. They make him watch the videotape; Marty leaves the cabin for the replay. He has to remember the careless indifference with which the man lied about Marie Fontenot.

Call it the joy of seeing Steve's $100,000 dick-extension-mobile shot to shit, but Marty's regained some of his good mood by the time they drive away from the boat.

“Maybe after this is all over, we should become pirates,” he says.

Rust tips his head, discontented. “Had my fill of boats.”

“Fine. Highwaymen, then. We can mount a gun on the back of your piece of shit truck.”

A cloud of cigarette smoke obscures Rust's expression, but he sounds almost wistful when he says, “Still not calling you captain, Marty.”

* * *

Rust tells him Maggie came by the bar, and all Marty can do is squint out the windshield. He doesn't know what to do with this information.

“You should've fucking told me,” is what he arrives at.

“I'm telling you now,” Rust says. “I don't know, I reckoned it was best to just avoid her name. Didn't want to invite judgments. You never liked being judged.”

When he dug out the old photo of the green house in Erath, the look on Rust's face made him feel victorious. It is a hard thing to admit after all these years, but he gives a damn what the other man thinks of him. And caring what Rust thinks has always been a double-edged blade.

Marty's what you might call sensitive to judgment. Especially from Rust. He thinks it's something to do with how long they've known each other; from what Marty can tell, disapproval from a brother feels a lot like this. Half of you wants to meet his expectations, because he knows you better than maybe anybody out there. The other half wants to smack him for thinking he's got the right.

He says finally, “No, you're right. I don't – not by you.”

“Well, I didn't say a word.”

“Well,” says Marty, “I could read it all over your face.”

Rust crumples down in his seat. “Then the problem's with your face, not mine.”

Marty has to look away from the road to stare at him, because that was probably the most childish thing he's ever heard come out of the man's mouth. And he's seen Rust as an actual child.

He shakes his head. “It's hard to find something in a man who rejects people as much as you do, you know that?”

“I'm not rejecting you, Marty. And I never told you how to live your life, not once.”

“Only because it would've screwed with your causality meter.”

“It's not _my_ causality meter,” he snaps. And then, like he can't stop himself: “And it's not a meter, for fuck's sake – ”

“See? Judging.”

* * *

They get an address for their green-eared spaghetti monster.

* * *

It's hard to establish a definitive celebratory line by pouring a drink when Rust's been drinking for a few hours already, but Marty doesn't let this stop him. They might, he thinks a little sickly, not get a chance after.

As much as he wants to see this thing to its end, part of him wishes they never find their man with the scars. Because he has a terrible feeling about what it'll mean when it's all over. But he doesn't get a choice, because they have an address and tomorrow afternoon they are going to drive out to it.

Certain things take time to learn, one of them being not to drink before a big day. But Rust's got him doing some time-traveling too, or must be, because here he is drinking like he never learned that particular lesson. They finish off the bottle in the office and walk back to Marty's place on his insistence. Damn if he's going to let Rust drive loaded out to his apartment in the country when he's got a perfectly comfortable couch.

To his surprise, Rust doesn't fight him on it. Once there, he briefly pokes around the main room, probably mentally comparing it to the old house with Maggie and the girls. Soon enough he loses interest in perusing Marty's small bookcase and circles back to the kitchen.

He cracks open two more beers and hands one to Marty before collapsing beside him on the couch.

Marty drinks the beer and surveys the expanse of his own torso from the always-flattering angle of his chin pressed low against his chest. “You know, working with you again is really wrecking my waistline – ”

Rust leans over and kisses him.

He kisses hard and a little clumsy, and it could be the drink or he could be out of practice. But he's real determined. Desperate, even.

Marty is too startled to react at first, but he gets a hand around the back of his neck – not a tight hold, but a solid counterweight, reminding Rust he's actually here and he's not going to be the one to disappear. He tries to gentle the kiss for a few seconds before his brain catches up. Then he shoves him roughly back.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he demands.

“Marty – ”

“If you say one word about a bucket list, I swear I will shoot your balls off.”

“Don't got a bucket list,” Rust says, turning fractionally away and slumping down the coach, a little sullen.

“Sure you do, you son of a bitch. And it's got one item on it.” He spreads his arms, not knowing if he means himself or the case. “ _This_.”

He is a little surprised to realize he is actually furious – he's shaky with it. “What, you think I'm so dumb I didn't pick up on all your little fucked up comments? _I'm ready to tie it off, Marty. Sure hope death is the end, Marty._ ”

“Why anyone thinks you're the people person in this partnership is beyond me,” Rust says to the wall. He's gone stony, and every word out of Marty's mouth seems to harden him a little more. His mouth is pressed thin and angry; it's difficult to believe it was just on him so eager and coaxing.

His fucking paramour. This absolute prick love of his life.

“I am the people person,” he snarls. “It's why I know not to do things like kiss someone before I – before,” and he can't finish the sentence, he can't make himself say it. He can't summon the air to fill his lungs to push the words out.

Rust stares at him, solemn but not denying anything, and Marty can't take it. He twists around and carefully sets his beer on his dinner tray. His limbs are heavy, his throat tight.

Suicide has always been a bit of bogeyman to him. He figures – if you just don't _look_ at it standing there in the shadows, you'll be fine. Why can't Rust stop looking at the fucking shadows?

His head is in his hands. Rust places his hand on Marty's back, oddly experimental, like touching him is fine when he's holding him back from a fight but strange new territory when it's about comfort. He's even rubbing it a little, but – weirdly, like one might try to burp a baby. Marty thinks about that for two seconds and feels even worse.

“I'm sorry for kissing you,” Rust says after ten minutes in which Marty does not cry into his beer.

He sniffs. “Fuck off.”

* * *

“ _Why you?_ ” Marty has been asked for what some days feels like an eternity.

One hundred miserable, demanding Rust Cohles fanned out backwards and forwards through time, each looking Marty over and coming to the same conclusion he's nothing special, that he means fuck-all. “ _Why you, motherfucker?_ ”

He doesn't know how time works or none of that fourth dimension shit Rust sometimes goes on about, and he tries but he doesn't know if he really believes in God. But as he crawls and puts his hands over the blood leaking from Rust's body, he thinks _maybe it had to be me, for this._

 _Dear God,_ _let it be for this._


	5. Old Hearts

 

 

Rust discovers in the dark, there is no time.

 

* * *

Detectives Gilbough and Papania follow up with him as soon as the hospital starts allowing visitors. He tells them what he remembers, hears himself tell it as if from another room. His hearings muffled like he's got cotton in his ears, and he has a low ringing on his right side. The doctors say it should go away.

For some reason, the detectives think he wants to know how the fallout from the investigation is going, forensics analyses and the like – as if he hasn't seen enough of that sick shit to last him the rest of his life. Maybe they're getting their old white men mixed up; Rust would care. Marty finds he can't.

“How's Rust?” he asks. It's the same question he asks every person who walks into his room. He can tell the answer's not good by the noncommittal look they share.

He receives more visitors after that – his girls, a couple guys from the old station, even Crash late one night. But he's not fit for conversing with any of them. He's waiting for a different visitor, a sign. He should be used to waiting, but when he thinks of waiting more, waiting _forever_  – he can't bear it.

 

** Part V **

 

Marty has nightmares of Rust disappearing mid-surgery. He wonders how it didn't come up before. Rust has never voiced concern about traveling in moments of crisis, but if the man could appear in Marty's room at the academy bleeding fresh from the bullets in the side, what's to stop him from disappearing on the operating table, or from the recovery unit?

How did he never ask about this shit?

His nurses tut over his vitals, don't like the sound of his breathing when they slap a stethoscope on him. He wants to shout but deliberately goes the other way instead – is all _sugar_ and _sweetheart_ , wheedling _hey how's my partner_.

His night nurse is a six-foot-tall man named Luis, and he takes the sweetheart talk in stride better than Julia from second shift. Go figure.

“Could I just – do you think you could ask one of his doctors to talk to me?” he asks. “I'm going outta my mind here.”

“I'll see what I can do,” Luis promises and Marty doesn't know if he's being humored or what but the next morning Laurie pokes her head into his room.

They saw each other once, a few years back. Marty was checking on a client recovering from a nasty domestic. They'd talked for five minutes, awkward and not a little pained on both sides. He's never known how to talk to her, the one person he ever met who was walking proof Rust was a sexual being.

She's looking good. Older, with a thick streak of grey in her hair she's not bothering to hide. But good. He wonders what Rust will make of her, once he wakes up.

“Mr. Hart,” she says and then, with a smiling wince, “Marty.”

She reaches for his chart. “Your nurse tells me you're going to do permanent damage if you don't stop fussing. Do you take hatchets to the chest often, you feel you can be so nonchalant about the aftermath?”

“How is he?” he asks.

Her mouth twists. She lowers the chart.

“I won't lie, he's in pretty rough shape,” she says quietly. “He made it through surgery and so far there isn't any sign of infection, but the trauma is – extensive. He's got a long road ahead of him, Marty.”

He shifts on the bed and immediately winces but pays it no mind. She isn't telling him anything he didn't already know. He asks, insistent, “But what happens if he travels like this?”

Laurie frowns. “He won't.” She sounds more sure than he expected, and that alone makes part of him relax a little.

“How do you know?”

She gets a speculative, sharp look in her eyes. Rust's smart woman. “Sorry, I – thought you'd know more about his condition.” He stares at her; she relents. “Traveling requires an EEG above 8 hertz – when he's conscious, basically. And if he wakes up, he'll be so reliant on the machines to function, for fluids – I just don't see it happening.”

He says, “You mean, when he wakes up.”

She inclines her head, but it's not quite a nod. He closes his eyes and lets out a long, shuddering breath. She hasn't moved when he opens them again. She is watching him closely, her arms folded around her clipboard, a pinprick of concentration pinched between her eyebrows.

“The fluids,” he says, clinging to the topic, because all information is useful and it's as good a distraction as any. “Does that – I mean, is there something he could take that would stop it altogether?”

Maybe that's what happened, he thinks with sudden, wild hope: maybe that's why he hasn't seen him – Rust starts taking medication.

But she is shaking her head slowly. “The condition hasn't really been studied properly.” She flips a hand: the pragmatic medical mind. “It's so rare.”

Stomach sinking, he nods like he understands. He doesn't know what else to say.

“Years back,” she begins and then pushes on quickly, like they can both forget the couple years the two were together, like it isn't sitting in the room at Marty's bedside. “Years back, I offered to run some tests. You can imagine what he thought of that.”

Marty curls his mouth a little in acknowledgement.

She says, determinedly neutral, “Since he wasn't having kids, he wasn't too interested. Didn't see the point. But you ask me, I think – I think he secretly liked it. The traveling.”

He raises his eyebrows. “You sure we're talking about the same man?”

“What do you mean?”

“It's just – I wouldn't go too far reading into that, is all,” he says. “Rust isn't exactly in the habit of wishing to change things that can't be changed.” He's never seen the man more than resigned when it came to his condition.

She wears the knowing, unamused smile of a woman who perhaps tried couples therapy with Rust.

“You know, two detectives came here to ask me about Rust a few weeks ago. Wanted to know all sorts of strange things – why we broke up back in '02, if I remembered anything he was working on at the time, when and where he traveled.”

“Yeah, we figured they would,” he says.

She looks past him out the window. “Detective Papania asked me if I felt I'd dodged a bullet.”

It's a damn inconvenient thing, feeling a defensive instinct for someone who is so endlessly causing offense, but Marty has decades of practice.

Laurie's eyes shift from the window to him and she smiles at whatever expression she sees there. “Told them I was pretty sure that particular bullet had someone else's name on it.” She gestures again, a quick expansive motion to encompass the room, Marty, maybe the whole hospital. “Guess I wasn't wrong.”

“Yes,” he says stubbornly. “You were.”

He's not being noble. This mess was as much his as it was Rust's – the old fuck up, at least, was definitely on him. He thinks it'll never not bother him now, people thinking he's some kind of hero because of all this.

She makes motions to leave the room but pauses at the door and looks back, almost unwilling. “You know, whatever he would say about it, I think he needed to travel. I think he liked the possibilities of where he might go. Who he might see.”

It's a hell of a thought to leave him with.

* * *

They tell him when Rust wakes up but it's another two days before they let him get in a chair and wheel down to his room.

He looks broken, is what Marty first thinks when he sees him lying there.

Bruises upon bruises form a matte shadow where a pair of sleepy eyes should be. It's difficult to look at, but for the first time since Marty woke up, he feels a little at ease. He parks his chair beside the bed and rests for a while.

He can barely keep the grin off his face when Rust snaps at him. But the feeling fades quick as he realizes Rust isn't just irritated with being trapped in the hospital and bedridden – he's genuinely distressed.

“I saw him, Marty,” he says.

He knows who he is talking about, no name required. “What, like in a dream? Because the man's dead, Rust. Headshot.” He kind of wants to congratulate him on aiming so good while he was bleeding out on the ground, but he doesn't. Marty can read a room; he'll keep the sentiment for a later date.

“No, I mean – he was mowing that schoolyard on Pelican Island in '95. I couldn't tell how tall he was 'cause he was sitting and his face was, it was dirty.” He presses his lips into a flat, pained line. “But I saw him.”

“ _That's_ what's bugging you?” Marty is completely at a loss.

Rust isn't in the mood to be consoled. “I should've known. I'd heard his voice before. I – I'd been _there_ before, Marty.”

“Yeah, I saw.” Marty thinks of the terrified little boy he saw, the slight figure who nearly gave him a heart attack, popping up in the brush. It bothers him intensely to think of a kid, walking through life knowing that place in the woods was out there. To remember, over and over, that the kid was Rust.

He says, “Makes my head spin, how long we both been circling this whole thing. Fuckin' – years, man. Decades.”

Rust swallows and tongues at his bruised lip. His eyes flicker over the room like he can see straight through the walls and across miles back to Carcosa.

He says roughly, “It's not over – the Tuttles, those fucking men on the tape. We didn't get them all.”

Marty'd been right about him caring and he wishes he wasn't. Rust might be self-involved – taking the weight of this case on his shoulders is proof enough of that. But Marty is the selfish one. They made it out alive; he can't ask for anything more than that. If he could, he'd give Rust some of his selfishness, hook the two of them up and transfuse it like blood or some other vital fluid.

Enough. Marty leans forward in his chair. “Yeah, and we ain't gonna get 'em all. That ain't the kind of world it is, but Rust – we got ours. We got him. It _is_ over.”

He isn't sure Rust hears him, or wants to listen. But he will, he thinks. Now that Rust is awake, Marty feels more hopeful and determined. He can make Rust listen. They have time now.

* * *

Marty doesn't sleep very well after he gets released from hospital. In his dreams he is back in Carcosa and around every corner is another Rust – splayed and trussed; some fresh, some rotting. Some young, some the same man lying back at Lafayette General. And all presented in sick offering to Childress's deranged vision.

He rattles around his apartment, worried about the low-grade but persistent pain in his chest but too restless to stop moving for long. He keeps thinking about the look on Rust's face in that hospital bed. He wishes he could get him out of there.

A few days pass and he doesn't really see anyone. He gets a lot of curious wide-eyed looks from his neighbors, people he knows by face but not by name. He has too much time on his hands. Rust was only in the apartment the one time, but it still feels like he's missing from it. Marty got used to having someone to look at and talk to real quick.

He goes to the hospital every day and lets Rust bitch at him for fussing, but eventually he always has to return home, where it's all empty rooms and dead air.

“Okay, old man,” he says aloud one night, standing in the middle of his living room. “Stop on by whenever you feel like it. I'll be here.”

He pauses and looks around, like maybe a wizened senior citizen with a smoker's cough might pop out from behind a corner, like he was waiting for the invitation. (And fuck, he wants to see Rust gone completely grey. He wants to shave that mustache off his face and get a look at how wrinkled the skin of his upper lip actually is. He just wants him.)

He feels awkward and warm, even though there's nobody to overhear him make a fool of himself. But it still feels like the bravest thing he's ever done when he says:

“I'm here, Rust.”

* * *

He ends up spending almost as much time at the hospital after he's checked out than when he was still a patient, or so Luis the night nurse makes it sound when he finds him punching in quarters for a vending machine coffee late one evening.

“You know healing don't stop when you hit the doors,” he says, folding his arms and regarding him with disapproval. “You need to be getting rest. Eight hours of sleep, minimum.”

He is a couple decades too late if he thinks Marty's gonna be intimidated by a frown in some scrubs.

“I'm getting plenty of sleep,” he protests.

“It's almost eleven, Mr. Hart.”

He shrugs. “I had some free space in my schedule.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, see, I've always been a bit of a night owl,” Marty explains. He might have even been convincing, if he didn't have to hide his yawn behind the little paper cup of coffee.

Luis rolls his eyes. “Go to your partner before I call someone and have you committed.”

Marty thinks he is probably stretching the term _partner_ further than it is currently strictly allowed to go, but the part of him that craves approval, that most un-Rust core of him, can't help but be heartened.

“The night nurse thinks you're my beau,” he announces as he enters Rust's room.

Rust twitches on the bed, startled out of thought. Which can likely only be a good thing.

He croaks, “What'd you do to piss him off?”

“It's not like that. Yesterday I overheard him calling us _very sweet_." He kicks back in the beside chair. "You and me: sweet. _Very_.”

“Jesus,” says Rust. “His standards are low. You ain't even brought me flowers, you useless fuck.”

And for that, Marty resolves to find the biggest, brightest bouquet in the whole parish. It costs about the same as the monthly payment on his car, but it's worth it for the look on Rust's face when he sets the floral monstrosity on the table beside his bed.

“What's it taste like?” Marty asks. “Commodified emotions, maybe? Market-tested sentimentality?”

“It tastes like the trunk of your car,” Rust says. But he keeps his face turned so he can see the flowers in his peripheral at all times. Marty loses track of where the joke stopped.

* * *

“I'm not saying I have the secrets to life,” Marty says a couple afternoons later.

“This should be good,” Rust mutters.

He is getting his catheter out today. Marty is hanging around to provide moral support; he has years of practice in absorbing Rust's endless bitching. And maybe he feels a little bad for the hospital staff, trying to help a man so determined to refuse it.

Marty ignores the interjection. “But I do know it's important to stay busy. If fucking – Anderson, remember Anderson, retired back in '96? DUI'd himself into pylon four years later?”

“Moron couldn't find a PC if smoke was pouring out a house.” Rust says, which means yes, he remembers Anderson.

“Exactly. If fucking _Anderson_ can get into trouble after leaving the force because he had too much time on his hands, what the fuck did you think was going to happen to you?” Marty shakes his head. “Brain like yours, it's like you set out to do yourself in using the slowest, most miserable methods possible. All while pretending like you was doing something different.”

“Lying to oneself seems more like your thing, don't you think?”

“Who said anything about lying? My bet is you had it on a schedule, ramp up the drinking and assholery every couple months until either the liver went or someone hauled off and decided to put you outta your misery.”

“Maybe I was counting on you to be the one to do it.”

“You're in for another disappointment, then.” Despite his light tone, Marty's mouth is dry. Part of him wants to say _don't joke about that_ – because there was a time, ten years ago, where he could've seen it happening. He would've never forgiven himself, but he could see it.

“You don't disappoint me, Marty,” Rust says quietly. He even sounds like he means it.

Marty looks over at him in surprise. After a moment he replies, very serious, “Now that's a goddamn lie if I ever heard one.”

They exchange small grins, maybe both thinking the other's wrong but the argument can wait for another time. They've disappointed each other plenty over the years, but it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Marty thinks maybe it's not lowered expectations so much as a state of odd grace.

He leaves Rust to enjoy the dubious delights of shuffling all by his lonesome to the bathroom a few feet from his hospital bed. Now that Rust is officially mobile, Marty has another gift to buy.

“Are we getting engaged?” Rust asks that evening, turning the little blue box over in his hands.

“Rust, c'mon,” he says, exasperated. “I'd've gotten a nicer ribbon.”

 

(2012) 2029

First day Marty gets out of his hair, leaves him alone at the house for a few hours to run some errands, the old man comes skulking around like a guilty mutt, tracking in the detritus of a lifetime.

Rust can only stare.

His face is more lined but clean shaven and clear-skinned. The hair is completely grey – combed but fighting the tide with wiry waves that refuse to lie flat. He is wearing their customary tank and on his arm below their bird, just kissing the edge of its wing, is a nicotine patch.

“Guess I miss my appointment with the storage unit, then,” Rust says distantly.

He doesn't need to say anything else because his older self will surely remember the plan, soft-formed as if out of clay and gaining definite shape from frequent handling after he left Alaska. He was going to park his truck in the storage unit before the six-month lease was up. Leave it idling, lower the unit door, put the truck seat back and light a cigarette. A quiet ride from one darkness to another.

It's not the kind of thing you forget.

“Proof of life, motherfucker,” the old man says and bends over Marty's coffee table to grab Rust's pack of cigarettes. He makes quick work out of sticking one between his lips and lighting it.

Rust feels very tired, watching this. He waves him on a little bitterly. “If you want to smoke, smoke. Don't see why we'd bother with the patch after all this time.”

“Let's just say there are some people who prefer not to smell it on us.”

“Marty's never cared,” Rust says, in what's probably a lie.

“Nice try, prick. I'm not telling you who.”

“I don't see what possible difference it would make.”

Rust blows a stream of smoke right at him. “Then you won't mind continuing on in ignorance.”

“Fucking Christ, why are you even here?” he asks, exasperated. Then he goes still in shock, one hand freezing where it was rubbing his eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Older Rust says, watching him closely. “Answer's the same it's always been. None of this means anything – but ain't it interesting that you're wondering again?”

A lurch of something in his chest – not fear, but. “Fuck off.”

Rust nods like this is the expected answer.

“It won't be easy,” he says and ashes his cigarette. “Often it won't feel worth it. And in a few years it's gonna really seem like we fucked something up causality-wise. Maybe stepped on a butterfly or some shit. But you'll get through it.”

“Why?” Maybe he should be asking instead _how_ , but he's starting to think Marty was right and he is some kind of unkillable cockroach. So the question remains _why_. Why the fuck should he.

But his older self is, as ever, completely uninterested in being helpful. He says, “Figure it out your own damn self,” and disappears again.

Marty is perplexed and not a little pissed when he arrives home and finds that Rust has broken the bathroom mirror.

* * *

Marty has spent so much of his life trying and mostly failing to be a good man, testing the limits of the definition and checking to see if he fits. With Rust, he doesn't care so much whether he's being good, so long as he's taking care of him. Maybe that's what it was always supposed to be, people taking care of each other.

Marty's not very good at it. He's thoughtless and impatient, too quick to snap back defensively when Rust says something sneering. But he figures maybe it's okay if there's room for improvement, because as bad as Marty is at taking care of someone, Rust's simply terrible on the receiving end. Like, a real asshole.

And he's an annoying roommate. Marty's not so dewy-eyed about the bastard that he's going to let him off the hook for that either. He keeps putting the toaster put away in the drawer beside the sink and he never refills the ice tray. If he gets to the coffee machine before Marty, he reuses the filter for a second brew and looks harassed when Marty inevitably spits the coffee out and makes a fresh pot.

“I'm being economical,” he says. “You seen those hospital bills?”

“You're being cheap, you crazy Alaskan yahoo. Not all of us have our taste buds permanently stunted from cigarettes. There are plenty of things in life to cut corners on, but I draw the line at my coffee.”

Rust gives him an unimpressed glance and very pointedly lights a cigarette before shuffling off to the living room. He's able to move on his own now, no more grimacing acceptance of Marty's shoulder as he hobbles around the house. He spends a lot of time sitting out in the backyard, draped in a blanket like it isn't still sweltering out.

He speaks little and smiles less.

But he always makes room for Marty on the couch in the evening, and he says _mornin'_ every day with the determined attitude of someone trying to memorize lines in a play.

Marty figures they're both putting the work in.

* * *

With every new body uncovered, the news stories grow and multiply. Some follow up with the old cold cases, shadowing Rust's decades-old investigation and occasionally turning up a fresh face to interview about the deceased. But most of the frenzy is focused on the late Errol Childress, newest entry in the American canon of murderous psycho freaks. He probably already has a fansite somewhere; Marty is perhaps becoming as cynical as Rust.

Somewhere in there, a relative or neighbor or something mentions talking to Marty and Rust back in '95, and the TV news vans regroup and show up in front of Marty's house. It's two weeks since Rust left the hospital.

“How'd they find me?” Marty demands, glaring through the slots of his window blinds. “I've been unlisted since before I left the force.”

“Maybe one of your neighbors sold you out,” Rust says from his nest of blankets on the couch.

“You don't seem too bothered none.” Marty twists around and gives him a speaking look. “Just wait 'til some hungry young reporter catches wind of your condition. See how you like being hounded every step you take in public.”

He thinks Rust maybe pales a little, but Marty is distracted by the doorbell ringing. He spends the rest of the afternoon fending off interview requests and yelling through his door about private property like the kind of over-the-hill hick he never thought he'd be.

It shouldn't be as much of a surprise when he checks in on the guest room that evening and finds a half-full duffle bag sitting on the end of the bed. Rust isn't in the room.

Marty sinks slowly down on the mattress, hand heavy on the bag like he can weigh the thing down enough to make it stay put. Rust has packed all that he brought over from his room behind the bar; some clothes, a stack of old ledgers, toiletries. It doesn't offer much in the way of a life, but it's all he has and now it's ready to be moved again.

Rust walks into the room and stops at the end of the bed. He looks at Marty. The expression on his face is one of finality; Rust has made up his mind.

Marty knew to expect this, of course. Over and over, he's told himself: this is how it works, this is the way it is between you. However long Rust may stay, he will always in the end _go_.

Maybe Marty hasn't seen an older Rust because, with the case over, they have no more ties to bind them together.

(Oh, _bullshit_.)

Rust's only wearing a towel around his waist, and he isn't making any sharpish moves to remedy this state. His sharp eyes flick between Marty and the bag; he steps past it to stand before him.

His hands come up to brace his hips, what Marty's always thought of as his thinking pose. His body is spare, his display of it to Marty unsparing.

He's only recently been approved for bathing without plastic wrap; the knife wound is still a deep, thick purple cord along his stomach. Another scar, another mark he'll carry. For however long he'll choose to carry it.

“Been a long time, Marty,” Rust says quietly.

Marty reaches for his narrow terrycloth-clad hips and reels him in close, and Rust comes along like he's never done anything different. He fits between the spread of his legs like Marty always thought he would, the final jigsaw piece he's always mislaying under a book or table.

“Longer for some than others,” he says, smiling a little. He hopes it doesn't look as sad as it feels. Rust gazes at him down the length of his scarred torso and doesn't say anything. His hand drifts up to touch the corner of Marty's eye, lightly.

Marty scoots back on the mattress some, and Rust still follows easy, his knees sorting themselves out and ending up on either side of Marty's hips, the towel a neglected vestment falling open.

Marty doesn't think his feelings have ever been a mystery to Rust (nothing about Marty has ever been a mystery to anyone, maybe). For a long time, that felt unfair. Asymmetrical. Now it feels like bedrock, like he's a foundation asking for trust.

He slides his hands up the outside of Rust's thighs, memorizing every minute shiver of the skin beneath his palms. He says, because why the fuck not at this point:

“You know, I used to – I used to beat off when I was a kid, thinking about you. Your fuckin' eyes, Rust. And you were always hanging around my house half-dressed – ”

A dark rumble of laughter builds in Rust's chest. “You hormonal teenager, I was never _half-dressed._ You think I wanted your father or a nosy neighbor calling the cops?”

“You doubting my memory?”

“I don't know, maybe. When was this?”

He groans, “Don't get me started on all that, it's too confusing and I fuckin' lived it.” His finger trace nonsense shapes over his skin, and he struggles to keep his thoughts linear. “I don't know, musta been – around '92 for you?”

“Think I had Chlamydia in '92.”

“Jesus, you are so bad at this.” Marty gives up on the petting and braces Rust with his arms to roll them carefully over. They end up nose-to-nose, his hand combed into the soft hair close to Rust's scalp.

Marty amuses himself with stalling for a few seconds – hovering and pulling back when Rust tries to close the distance.

“Hey, you gonna kiss me back this time?” Marty asks him, voice low.

“Maybe.” Rust's narrow expression tells him _if you're lucky_. “You gonna cry this time?”

“Only if you're not careful where you put those bony knees – _hey_ , watch it, I was just fuckin' kidding – ”

Rust gets a painful grips on his ears and drags him down into a kiss.

One thing marriage and divorce taught Marty was that you can love someone and not like them. Hell, you can love them and never want to see them again. Marty's had a lifetime of wanting Rust and loving Rust and feeling the relief of his absence. Now he wants him and loves him and finally has him, for now, and it's better than he ever imagined.

Rust kisses wild and deep and his hands are burning like a fever on his face and all down his back as he slides them, urgent and urging Marty on. He licks at Marty's mouth; Marty bites his lower lip.

“Who you thinkin' about?” Rust asks him between each searing press of his mouth. “Huh, Marty?”

“You,” Marty groans.

“Which one?”

He doesn't understand the question, and Rust's not playing fair, he's operating by some forsaken rules of the box, trying to get a confession while Marty's dizzy with the shower-clean warmth of his skin, the faintly bitter trace of tobacco in his mouth.

“Just you,” he says, moving down his chest, using his hands to span his shoulders, press him down, keep him, keep him right here with Marty. “Christ, it's always just you, Rust.”

He takes him into his mouth, and the thrill of it reverberates down to the core of him. Every man Marty's ever been, ever will be, must feel this.

Rust's cursing, unsuccessful in fully biting back the pleas and imprecations his mind produces. He shoves helplessly up against Marty's face and soon the only intelligible thing out of his mouth is _Marty, Marty, Marty_.

After, Marty sits back panting. Looking down at Rust's exhausted sprawl, his satisfaction blooms and then blurs halfway into alarm.

He belatedly asks, “Shit, were you cleared for sex?”

“Somehow I didn't care to ask my doctor about it,” Rust drawls, but he doesn't sound particularly concerned.

He blinks up at Marty, the haze of his orgasm clearing some, and he takes in the worried expression. His hands come up to press against his scarred midriff, like he needs to hold his guts inside before he can laugh – which he _does_ , the prick. He laughs at Marty.

It's the same short, breathy scoff that probably could've been motive for murder back in the day. Manslaughter at the very least. Marty used to have a mental palette for measuring the colors people would turn when Rust used that laugh on them.

Rust hooks an ankle around the back of his thigh and does something that makes him topple forward. Marty is caught off-guard but catches himself before he can crush him.

Rust gets a hand on his belt buckle, long fingers reaching around and dipping under to scrape at the soft skin beneath his waistband, run through the line of hair leading down his stomach, and Marty starts to shake.

“You're pretty close already, aren't you, Marty?” Rust asks. His tone would almost be clinical, if it wasn't so breathless. “That get you off, huh? Sucking me?”

Marty curses and buries his face against his neck. “I've always had a cocktease for a partner, what do you think? Decades of this shit.”

Rust only looks a little smug. Maybe if Marty hadn't imprinted on him early on, hadn't developed this dark liking for being talked down to in bed, he'd find it a turn off. But it just makes him burn more.

It's short work between the two of them, stripping off his jeans and kicking them away. And then it's the fantastic warmth of skin against skin, nothing in the world like it. Rust's long fingers wrap around him and they breathe together through it. A rhythm like the tide, like Rust moving in and out of his life.

He doesn't cry out for Rust when he comes; he spares himself that, at least. He presses his face into his neck and thinks it instead: _Rust, fuck, Rust._

He collapses beside him, leaving an arm and a leg over his body like a human paperweight. (Gotta stop him from blowing away.) Rust doesn't seem to mind; he strokes a hand idly up and down Marty's arm.

When he has breath back and thinks he can summon a neutral tone, Marty asks, “So where you gonna go?”

Rust tilts his head slightly on the pillow and says, “I know of a cabin up near Fairbanks, should be empty this time of year. Man I used to work with said I was free to use it.” He is more skilled at the whole neutral tone thing.

Marty thinks: with the weight Rust lost in the hospital – weight he couldn't afford to spare in the first place – he is going to be cold all the time up there. He doesn't have the wherewithal to keep himself warm. Marty doubts this damned cabin has central heating and air, like Marty's place does. It probably doesn't have a lot of things Marty's place has. Like Marty.

“I was thinking – you'd come with me,” says Rust.

His heart lurches in his chest. He laughs a little. “I know I'm a great lay, but isn't it a little reckless to base a decision on that?” What is this, he thinks: post-orgasm endorphins? Is that all it takes to soften Rust up? Should he have risked his hand and jacked Rust off in the car years ago?

“I mean it,” he says. “I was always going to ask, soon as I knew I needed to get gone.”

Bitter amusement fading, Marty stares at him silently. Rust pushes on, sounding persecuted:

“We could sit out this shit storm, wait for it to die down. Hopefully that's before winter hits or we'll have to think of another hideout, because I'm not living through another fuckin' January in Alaska. Should be a safe bet, though, you know how it is in election years. News is no different than any other human endeavor, always hungry for another headline and nobody has the attention span to actually stick with a story, so – ”

“You want me to come with you,” Marty says.

Rust blows out a breath. “Yes.”

Marty props up on one elbow and looks at him suspiciously. “Did you know what I was thinking that whole time? That you were leaving, I mean?”

They've been partners a long time; Rust understands what he's asking. He shrugs against the pillow. “Had an inkling, maybe.”

“And you didn't think to tell me earlier, maybe disabuse me of the notion?”

“Was curious what it'd feel like.” Rust lifts a hand and waves it vaguely. “Might be the only glimpse I get of this tender, pining version of you. Give it a couple weeks and you'll be fucking me like you know I always want it.”

Damn right, he thinks. He drops his elbow and crowds Rust on the pillow. “God, you're a prick.”

Rust grunts an unbothered assent. His eyes are going half-mast, he's drifting towards sleep. For all that he's always claiming to be cold, he seems content to lie there naked and uncovered.

“Can't believe we finally had sex and I don't have a cigarette,” he says, eyes opening wide suddenly.

“No cigarettes in bed,” Marty says, firm. He gropes for the blanket tossed rumpled to the bottom by their earlier activities and draws it up over their bodies. The light in the room is still on, but he can't be bothered to get up to turn it off; he figures it'll be fine just this once, not sleeping in the dark.

 

2014 (1977)

Rust has spent so much of his life trying to slow down, to stand perfectly still. He used to journal to capture what he witnessed in his own necessarily attenuated form of chronological order. These days he is content with a more impressionistic record of life: a sink full of hair shavings; the ruck and curl of bedsheets after a restless night of sleep; the dorsal view of Marty bending over and contorting in unheard-of feats of flexibility to get at the cable box; tracking minute changes in the tree in the backyard through the months they pretend are seasons down here.

One late night, he leaves Marty asleep and reaching across the mattress for him and lets himself out onto the front stoop. He lights a cigarette and already has his sketchbook open when he travels to a residential street in the backend of a summer afternoon.

He almost shuts his eyes, because wherever he is, it's _bright_. After adjusting, he looks around properly and relaxes. He knows where he is.

He knows this neighborhood by the line of magnolias the city will tear down sometime in the late 80s and the row of modest brown duplexes across the street from where he stands. Several of the cars parked nearby give a strong impression of _catalytic converter, what's that?_ so he thinks it must be fairly early on.

He spares a regretful glance for his bare feet and steps off the hot sidewalk and onto the crabgrass of the parkway strip. He leans one shoulder up against a light pole to wait.

The host for his visit rounds the corner less than a minute later, looking substantially worse for wear. He has a fat lip and is bleeding a little from a cut on his forehead up near his still-optimistic hairline. His bright hair – the longest he'll ever keep it – is roughly mussed, like someone's been pulling it.

The kid starts slightly when he looks up and sees Rust standing there, surprise and something like pleasure wiping the scowl momentarily from his face.

“Marty,” he says mildly in greeting.

“Rust, man, where your shoes?”

“I was in bed.” A technical lie, but hardly the worst one he'll ever tell him. He falls in step beside the kid, walking in parallel slowly along the stretch of grass.

“Weird to think of you sleeping,” Marty says. One of the more aggravating aspects of Marty when he is young is his stubborn tendency to assume Rust isn't quite human. He's always surprised by any admission of weakness.

“Who said I was sleeping?” he drawls, mostly to see if the kid will go red. He doesn't disappoint.

Rust steps around a fire hydrant and points, circling a finger in the air. “What's with the face? You been fighting?”

He immediately wonders if he should've tried injecting some appropriate adult disapproval into the question. But he discards the thought; Marty will perceive himself judged plenty by Rust in good time. And he is unlikely to react to an admonishment about fighting with anything but well-deserved scorn.

Marty grimaces and actually kicks the sidewalk. Rust watches him with abstracted affection, knowing full well the expression won't be interpreted as anything but amusement.

“It was nothing,” Marty says. “Some guy was mouthing off down at the batting cages.” He doesn't elaborate further, as if a simple exchange of insults was an adequate explanation for the swelling bruise around his eye, the bright red smearing over his mouth.

“Sometimes I almost forget about that temper of yours.”

“I don't have a temper,” Marty says, automatic and predictable. He looks almost offended when Rust snorts, but the expression breaks immediately. An _aw-shucks_ grin steals across his face. “Okay, yeah. It's just – I don't _feel_ like I have a bad temper. Or that I should, I guess. I swear, it's like it comes outta nowhere sometimes.”

“Try to avoid putting anyone in the hospital, and you'll probably be fine,” Rust advises. Mostly fine, he thinks. Eventually.

“Shouldn't you know if I am?” he wants to know.

“I'm not your lifelong alibi, kid. I haven't seen every second of your life.” He pauses and adds in an undertone, “Thank fuck for that.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Marty says, angling a look at him.

They turn onto Marty's street and Rust does a quickstep across the frypan asphalt of the road, ignoring the muffled laughter behind him. When he gets to the other side, he digs his toes into the rich lawn in front of Marty's childhood home. Marty's father is always real careful in keeping up his lawn; Rust is always equally careful to spill his ash and cigarette butts all over it.

Marty doesn't go inside the house; he gets to the top of the porch steps and sits down. Rust settles on the lawn a few feet away and turns to a fresh page in his sketchbook. It's quick work, outlining Marty's face, the defensive line of his shoulders. Rust has seen him under the influence of every biochemical cocktail the human brain can come up with, but he never gets tired of trying to capture it.

“Not that I'm not enjoying the evening air,” he says around his cigarette, “but is there a reason you're not going inside?”

“I hate it in there,” Marty says flatly.

Rust pauses. “Oh?”

“Yeah. I can't stand it anymore. My dad's always bitching about me going out, but it's not like he's here when I do come home. I could be shooting up heroin in our living room, for all he'd know.”

Rust considers this. He advises, “Don't don't pick heroin.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Marty laughs a little sadly and presses his palms against his eyes. He curses under his breath, too quiet for Rust to make out the particulars. Then he asks, tone fighting for even and already sounding like he regrets the question: “Rust, am I always gonna be alone?”

This Marty hasn't been to college yet, Rust reminds himself. It's not quite fair to find his pain funny, melodramatic as it may seem. He hasn't seen how easily he'll make friends with a new crowd. He doesn't know anything but the darkened house at his back.

“You'll have your share of full houses, kid.”

Marty drops his hands into his lap. “But I thought you weren't my alibi or whatever.”

He is pushing back despite being the one who asked – typical Martian bullheadedness or a sideways request for further comfort? He always did like fishing.

“I know the basics,” says Rust.

“So – you're saying I have a family?” Marty rubs at his knuckles until the barely born scabs break and new blood beads up. He looks up at Rust. “Kids?”

Rust considers him: a lonely kid at the bottom of an empty, polyester decade, about to enter adulthood in one that will tell him money can buy happiness and the only heroes are men who help themselves. A continent divides him from a boy who learned he was alone when he was ten, who won't dare think otherwise for years, until he thinks it too late and he too broken. They both have far to go – hours and days, weeks and years. A lifetime twisting back on itself, but a lifetime entwined.

This Marty is already used to Rust's evasions. He's not really expecting an answer from him and bites his lip, clearly trying to pretend like he don't mind.

“Sure, you have kids,” Rust says. He grips his pen. “And someone waiting for you at home, every night.”

He watches the knowledge settle like a counterweight in the compromised pulley system of the boy's emotions; Marty straightens a little. His eyes, always so quick to dampen, are very bright. But his smile is brighter.

* * *

“Where'd you go?” Marty mumbles when he returns to bed. He raises his arm to allow Rust to slip in beside him and then lowers it like a portcullis; Rust is allowed in, but the world stays out.

Rust turns his head into his pillow and mostly shuts his eyes. “Giving life advice to a teenage delinquent.”

“Kid's doomed for sure then,” Marty says. He's not fully awake and consequently talking complete shit.

Rust runs a hand still warm from a summer three and a half decades previous up his side. He's chasing definition, the lines he'd use to build a Marty on page; here's the hipbone, the soft sling of his gut, the hard lower curve of the ribcage.

Marty twitches, because he's secretly ticklish as hell.

Rust murmurs, “He sure was in a sorry state. Felt kinda bad. Almost wanted to tell him everything right then and there.”

“Mm. Everything?” Marty urges him in close with a hand against the small of his back. Rust goes freely.

“You know.” He presses a kiss to his shoulder. He follows it up with another to his collarbone. “That he'll be okay. That I'll be there, eventually.” He presses his face into his neck. “That I love him.”

Marty's arms tighten around him. “You were gonna tell him all that?”

“Sure.”

Their bodies slide together honey slow and lock into alignment. Rust feels Marty's grin against the edge of his jaw, as familiar and welcome as the sight of home at the end of a long day.

“Eh,” Marty says, sleep-warm and selfish with it. “Let the little punk wait his turn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it is complete. What a wild ride this winter has been.
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who read along as I was writing snippets on tumblr and who commented while posting here! Comments make my day!


End file.
